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Rethinking Media Bias
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12232 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1987 |
4,151 Words |
| Author
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S. Robert Lichter
S. Robert Lichter directs the Center for Media and Public
Affairs. |
Some years ago, a reporter told the president, late in his second term, that he hoped the press hadn't made his job too difficult. The chief executive seemed puzzled, then responded, "What could you do to me?" It is difficult to imagine those words coming from Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson. As economist Herbert Stein comments in recounting this anecdote, "No president since Eisenhower would or could have said that."
In this era of the celebrity journalist and imperial media, it is important to remember how far the profession has come in recent years. To a degree that was scarcely imaginable a generation ago, the major media today stand at the center of the struggle for social influence. They act as crucial gatekeepers for the messages contending groups and individuals send to each other and to the general public.
Journalism's rapid rise to social prominence is bound up with a host of changes that have transformed American life during the past quarter century. The emergence of national networks in higher education, communications, and transportation have ensured that residents of Manhattan, Kansas, have access to much the same social images as their New York City namesakes. In today's information-hungry society, the media increasingly play a crucial role in linking social elites to one another and to the general public.
It may be hyperbole that "one correspondent with one cameraman (can) become as important as...twenty senators," as David Halberstam wrote of Vietam reportage.
It may be apocryphal that Lyndon Johnson decided his Vietnam policies were doomed after he watched Walter Cronkite reject them. It may be an overstatement that Woodward and Bernstein toppled Richard Nixon. Yet all these instances of media impact are not only plausible but widely believed. This in itself illustrates the enormous strides in social influence the national media have taken in the past quarter century. Once only a William Randolph Hearst or a Henry Luce might have been credited with starting or stopping a war, electing or defeating a president. The focus of acclaim and blame alike has now passed from the press lords to working journalists themselves.
The extent to which the tables have turned is illustrated by an encounter between Senator (and presidential candidate) Alan Cranston and CBS' Dan Rather during the 1984 New Hampshire primary. The two were having lunch when a CBS aide approached Cranston to say, "Senator, Mr. Rather will only
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