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The Tilt to the News: How Journalism Has Forsaken Objectivity
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10316 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
3,221 Words |
| Author
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H. Joachim Maitre
H. Joachim Maitre is professor of journalism, professor of
international relations, and director of the Center for
Defense Journalism at Boston University. He is editor of
Defense Media Review and coedited Paying the Premium: A
Military Insurance Policy for Peace and Freedom (Greenwood).
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"Mr. President," said the nation's second-ranked television news anchorman on May 27 and via satellite, "if we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we would take it right now and walk away winners . . . . Thank you very much, and tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we are pulling for her."
Dan Rather's declaration of adoration and active support for the Presidential couple was not meant for public viewing but--recorded through a technical glitch--caused yet another puncture in the perforated armor of American journalism. In professionally purer times, Rather's indiscretion would have destroyed what was left of his credibility as an honest news broker. He had shown his tilt.
Finally, after years of heated public debates and often-tedious scholarly discourse over alleged institutional liberal bias in the American news media, there is no argument on the basics any longer. "Everyone knows," said political scientist James Q. Wilson in the June 21, 1993, edition of the New Republic, "that the members of the national media are well to the left of the average voter."
For those skeptics still demanding statistical evidence that journalists tend to hold liberal political views, numbers were provided in a summer 1992 survey of fourteen hundred journalists, reported in The American Journalist in the 1990s, published by the New York-based Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. It concluded that 44.1 percent of those polled consider themselves Democrats and only 16.3 percent Republicans. The gap had grown since 1982, when a similar survey was done, and is now far larger than among the general population.
BIAS CREEPS INTO REPORTING
These figures as such would be of limited interest if they did not strengthen the suspicion that the personal political and philosophical preferences, his system of beliefs, his worldview would--unavoidably--seep into his reporting and that the stated imbalance between liberal and conservative leanings and loyalties already is gravely affecting the ways and worth of news reporting in this country. Slant is becoming ever more visible, nowhere more so than on television "news."
Examples of liberal bias and resulting slant abound. President Clinton had been in office less than a month when megastar Dan Rather offered his helping hand: Clinton's program "will include money to
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