In what has become a regular form of introspection, Clark Hoyt, the New York Times Public Editor (ombudsman) on Saturday took his paper to task http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27pubed.html for its failure to jump on the ACORN and Van Jones controversies. Hoyt raised the question of whether “liberal bias” resulted in the “slow off the mark” coverage and in what some conservative critics claimed was excessively sympathetic coverage when the paper finally got in gear.
Jill Abramson and Bill Keller, the managing and executive editors, told Hoyt an editor would be assigned “to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies,” but Hoyt exonerated the paper of liberal bias:
“Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias. Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, said he has studied journalists for years, and though they are more liberal than the general population, he believes they are motivated by the desire to get good stories, not to help one particular side. Conservatives who believe The Times isn’t critical of Democrats forget that the paper broke damaging stories about the personal finances of Representative Charles Rangel and the hiring of prostitutes by Eliot Spitzer.”
The debate over liberal bias -- even acknowledging the tilt to the left found in surveys of reporters and editors -- misses the point. Rosenstiel and Hoyt are right, journalists’ urge to get the big story (Monica, Whitewater, Rangel, Spitzer, etc., etc.,) clearly trumps their ideological and partisan sympathies.
These stories are not ideological in the sense that the pitted left against right: Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky, Rangel’s property scams, etc., etc are instantly recognizable are legitimate news stories to a liberal or conservative. Far fewer reporters, however, would automatically see the news value in a story about a White House environmental adviser who in October 2004 signed a petition pointedly suggesting that Bush and other “US leaders had foreknowledge of impending 9/11 attacks and ‘consciously failed’ to act,” who had also been a member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) http://web.archive.org/web/20070928082914/http://www.leftspot.com/blog/files/docs/STORMSummation.pdf , a Marxist group. In addition, few reporters would leap on the opportunity to write up videos of ACORN staffers coming up with a variety of illegal proposals to get loans to finance a brothel and to falsify tax forms.
In fact, not only would most reporters shy away from such stories, even fewer would relish the idea of trying to sell their editors on the importance of such coverage. Who wants to look like a winger nut?
What liberal journalists have an even harder time with is their lack of empathy for conservative – and in some cases ‘traditional’ -- values. Instead, all too often, reporters and editors universalize their own world views – professional and progressive -- unknowingly slighting millions of readers who do not share the same convictions. You can verify this by checking out stories in the mainstream media on the distribution of condoms in junior and senior high schools or proposals for explicit sex education courses for 5th and 6th graders; both sides of these controversies will be reported, but one side will be described with empathy and the other with a tone of incredulity.
Two incidents that brought these issues to the forefront took place at the Washington Post last decade.
On December 1, 1991, the Post front-paged a story headlined “From 2 Worlds, Conflicting Views Of I-295 Suspect; Teenager Seen as Mean, Nurturing,” a feature on 19-year-old Henry “Little Man” James. The first two paragraphs read:
“It was the day of his baby son's first birthday party. Henry James arrived at his girlfriend's Lincoln Park home bearing a Teenage Ninja Turtle cake and a gift of $ 140 in cash. He told the child's mother, a 16-year-old high school student, to buy the boy some clothes, and when he left the house, past sunset, Henry James seemed proud and happy.
“Later that night, James allegedly was riding in the back seat of a car going south on Interstate 295. Witnesses have told police that James said he felt like ‘bustin' somebody,’ then pulled out a gun, rolled down the window and fired at the Toyota that happened to be in the next lane. If this is so, the shooter hit his target perfectly. Patricia Diann Bigby Lexie, 36, an Alexandria resident, slumped over in the passenger seat next to her husband, shot in the head.”
James had already been accused of two random, motiveless shootings, was described by police as running a violent crack cocaine ring in his neighborhood and was implicated in a third shooting. The day after his arrest, 200 neighbors signed a petition asking that he be kept in jail without bail.
But there was another side, the authors wrote, “another facet of James -- as an interested father who was always generous with his money. They [friends and associates] said he made sure Johnson [the mother of one of his children] had nice clothes and hair-styling appointments, bought food and diapers for Devonta, the baby, and paid some of the household bills. They said he suffered from not feeling loved by his family.”
Needless to say, the story provoked a wave of outrage.
One letter to the editor: “Are you saying it is all right to be involved in crime if you buy diapers and make sure your girlfriend has hair appointments?” Another: “On one of his children's birthdays, he brought a ‘cake and $140 in cash’ to his girlfriend. What a nice guy.”
While I have no idea what went through the minds of the reporters (and their editors, who ran the gamut from top to bottom because it was a front page story). But the granting of equal balance to the two sides of Henry James reflects a mindset that has difficulty seeing evil and is more inclined to look for redemption.
This is a perfectly acceptable viewpoint, most commonly held by liberals, but if it colors and defines a news story, there will be many people who will see it as dangerously naïve and offensive. It did shape the James feature because many on the staff of the Post (and other newspapers) share this more idealistic vision of the world.
Some fourteen months later, the Post was caught up in a very similar, but much more intensely debated, controversy when on February 1, 1993, it published another front page story describing the Christian right followers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”
In this case, the Post’s phone started ringing moments after the paper hit the streets, and within a day, the editors ran a prominent correction: “An article yesterday characterized followers of television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as ‘largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.’ There is no factual basis for that statement.”
No heads rolled -- in large part because the top command of the newspaper had read the story and simply glossed over the offending sentence. The story was published as written, because no one in the chain from reporter to assignment editor to copy editor to national editor to managing editor thought it was wrong, arrogant or offensive.
The issue, then, is not purposeful liberal bias; instead, it is a failure to recognize how the liberal tilt of most reporters and editors affects their news judgment. If newspapers and other media are going to make a claim to objectivity at a time of political polarization, it will require some serious introspection as most pressures reinforce liberal assumptions rather than challenge them.
The danger in failing to do so challenge such assumptions – as demonstrated by the reaction to Henry “Little Man” James – is that not only will conservatives be angered and alienated, but so too will be many regular readers who are the bread and butter subscribers essential for the survival of the industry.
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