Denying the Undeniable: The Deception in Denying Liberal Media Bias

 by Allan Levite  

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Martin Lee, Norman Solomon, Ben Bagdikian, and Herbert J. Gans have all denied liberal media bias.  Here's how they did it.

In their 1986 book The Media Elite, S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter measured the extent of bias in the major media by interviewing 238 journalists at the TV networks and the print media.

Only 17% viewed themselves as being on the Right; 54% placed themselves left of center. 56% considered their colleagues to be mainly on the Left; only 8% saw them on the Right. Journalists' votes for Democratic presidential candidates typically outnumber those for Republican candidates by about 4-to-1. A nationwide Los Angeles Times study of 3,000 journalists (August 11, 1985) revealed virtually the same result: 55% called themselves liberal and 17% conservative. (The Media Elite's critics dispute its conclusions, but ignore the Times' almost identical results.)

Yet it's said that liberal media bias doesn't exist because — as in other fields — most journalists are apathetic and apolitical. But even disregarding these surveys, this argument fails. The ideologues need not be a majority for their bias to dominate the news. (As they contend, a small minority controls most of the nation's wealth.) If most journalists really are so apathetic, they won't complain when their activist colleagues editorialize the news — so the activists keep doing it.

We also hear that journalists don't lead, but "follow" public opinion. If this were true, whenever the public shifts rightward — such as from 1978 to 1990 — there'd be a comparable shift in media opinion or news slanting. There wasn't. If journalists "follow" public opinion, the 1985 L.A. Times study should have shown at least as many conservatives as liberals in the media, because among the public then, conservatives outnumbered liberals 29%-24% (see below). But 55% of the journalists were liberal. If these journalists wanted to "follow" public opinion, they could have told the poll-takers that they were conservatives. How could the pollsters have known otherwise?

The Lichter book didn't mention Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, journalists much further left than most. In their book Unreliable Sources, they complained of the media focus on Soviet society's negative aspects, ignoring its lack of homelessness and unemployment. "It is unusual to hear [in the media] about positive aspects of Soviet society," they claimed, such as security for the elderly. They criticized a Washington Post reporter who'd written that the USSR had "failed miserably," concluding that he must have worn "strict ideological blinders." Such comments "substitute for more accurate renditions of the Soviet Union with all its complexities." (Unluckily for them, their 1990 book was issued just before the demise of the USSR and all its "complexities." They presented the less accurate "rendition.")

To support their claim that media bias is actually conservative, Lee and Solomon trumpeted a Brookings Institution study's revelation: "58 percent of Washington journalists identified themselves as either 'conservatives' or 'middle of the road.'" They apparently didn't have the Brookings study (The Washington Reporters), but saw it mentioned in Media Monopoly, an influential book by Ben Bagdikian. He quoted only these statistics from it. But what it had actually said was that 42% of the reporters surveyed considered themselves liberal, 39% middle-of-the-road, and 19% conservative.

58% were "conservative or middle-of-the-road," but 81% were "liberal or middle-of-the-road." Padding his numbers, Bagdikian counted all centrists with conservatives, but none with liberals, as if centrists could agree with conservatives but never with liberals! He also concealed that liberal journalists outnumbered conservatives by over two to one. Readers got the false impression by Bagdikian (and by Lee and Solomon, who quoted him) that the Washington press leans rightward.

In the November/December 1985 Columbia Journalism Review, liberal sociologist Herbert J. Gans expressed similar views. Gans rejected the Lichter-Rothman findings that journalists favor income redistribution:

. . . Incidentally, a massive survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times in April 1985 among 3,000 journalists and 3,000 members of the general public included a question closely resembling the above opinion-statement. This time, 50 percent of the "news staff," 37 percent of the editors, but 55 percent of the public responded favorably to the question.

This was Gans' only mention of the Times study. The question he referred to concerned income redistribution. 55% of newspaper readers favored this, with 23% opposed. Among the journalists surveyed, 50% favored and 39% opposed it. But this part of the survey consisted of sixteen questions. The one question out of sixteen where journalists were more conservative than the public was the only one Gans mentioned. (He didn't even say how many total questions there were.)

Every one of the other 15 showed the press much more liberal than the readers. For example, 57% of the readers approved of President Reagan's stewardship. Only 30% of the news staff did, with 60% opposed. The survey's final question — a political self-description — showed 24% of the readers liberal, 29% conservative, and 33% "neither." Among the news staff, it was 55%, 17%, and 26%. Gans concealed the fact that the Times survey he'd quoted diverged from the Lichter findings by only 1%. Lee and Solomon unwittingly perpetuated this distortion when they cited the Times survey by quoting it from Gans' article.

The survey also noted that most of the public thinks "the press does not permit [its] liberalism to unfairly influence its news coverage," and that the newspaper they read most often is fair and impartial. But in "Why Press Credibility Is Going Down" (a January-February 1990 Washington Journalism Review article), Michael Robinson and Norman Ornstein related: "Four years ago, 53 percent [of general-public respondents] said news organizations 'tend to favor one side' in covering issues. Today that figure is 68 percent." Also, if the public detects no bias, Bruce W. Sanford might not have bothered writing his 1999 book Don't Shoot the Messenger: How Our Growing Hatred of the Media Threatens Free Speech for All of Us.

The Times article related that media bias may be too subtle for most readers to perceive, or they care so little about politics that they ignore bias. But many readers could see that if they admitted that their daily newspaper is biased, the next question might have been: "If you think your paper is biased, why do you keep reading it?" Few respondents would admit their willingness to endure media bias just to be able to read sports results and celebrity news. 

Gans accused the Lichters of unfairly contrasting the views of journalists and corporate managers to show that journalists are even more liberal. It would be better to compare their views with those of other professionals, such as teachers, social workers, and lawyers. (Gans, no fool, knew that liberalism is widespread among these groups.)  But the Times study did compare the views of journalists with "other college-educated professionals," who nevertheless turned out to be less liberal than the journalists. 37% of the professionals rated themselves liberal, and 30% conservative. Gans squelched these facts too.

I wrote Gans asking if he'd read the actual Times article. His cordial reply included a copy of his source — not the article, but a reprint of it. Still, it included all 16 questions and responses. It mentioned the 55% to 17% disparity between liberals and conservatives in the media, and that reporters and editors are much more liberal than their readers and other degreed professionals. And it even stated that its results "clearly lend substantial credence to the claim of many conservatives that there is a 'liberal media elite' in this country" — which Gans also failed to disclose.

Why didn't Gans just ignore my letter? Because knowing that the media downplay liberal miscues, he wasn't risking much. In the same month in 2002, there was a media furor when Republican Senator Trent Lott praised a deceased white supremacist senator. Lott had to resign his party leadership, but the media virtually ignored Democratic Senator Patty Murray's praise for terrorist Osama bin Laden for building day care and health care facilities.

Gans claimed that Rothman and the Lichters "hide a political argument behind a seemingly objective study, highlighting the data which support that argument." When his discussion of the Times survey mentioned the only response out of sixteen showing the results he liked, he was hardly in a position to assert this. Gans has written several books, including one appropriately entitled Deciding What's News.

Would all this chicanery have been necessary if its perpetrators believed that the facts supported them?

Culture: Media

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