Liberal Bias and the Hartford Courant (Cont.)
December 13th, 2006 by Ken Von Kohorn
I’ve been thinking about the problem with liberal bias in the news media. From reading the Courant, one would think that it has made an overt decision to staff itself with liberals. Is that indeed part of the job description? “Liberals only need apply”? Or are there other reasons for its lack of ideological diversity?
I doubt whether the Courant uses a political litmus test in its hiring practices – although if someone knows differently they should feel free to weigh in. But more likely, I began to consider what is taught – or more importantly, what is not taught – on today’s college campuses. As far back as 1987, Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind lamented that colleges had gradually eliminated requirements for students to study the “Great Books.” Since 1987 the problem has become more acute, with whole new departments focusing on narrow social grievances such as women’s rights, rather than on the great animating ideas of human intellectual development that ultimately paved the way for women’s rights. A corollary is that students are ignorant of the provenance of conservative ideas. They are rarely assigned readings from Edmund Burke or Adam Smith, nor are they aware of more recent surveys such as Russell Kirk’s wide-ranging The Conservative Mind.
As a result, students have been discouraged from thinking about conservatism as legitimate. Not knowing the intellectual underpinnings of conservative thought, many students by default accept the left-wing rant about conservatives being mean-spirited, bigoted, and worse. Contemporary conservative speakers, if even allowed on campus (a rare event), are heckled or prevented from reaching wide campus audiences. Add journalists’ tendency to see themselves as crusaders for the “public good” – usually defined by the tenets of political correctness – and you have a recipe for newspapers staffed almost exclusively by liberals.
The upshot of an all-liberal news team is that news stories too often are preconceived to fit liberal templates rather than allowed to evolve based on objective findings. Facts that contradict the template cause cognitive dissonance and so are suppressed.
How this works in practice can be illustrated by a story that goes back to Steve Forbes’ first presidential election campaign. Running for the GOP nomination, he had made a “flat tax” proposal the centerpiece of his campaign. The flat tax was an idea originally propounded by Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka of the Hoover Institution. Preparing for an evening news segment on Forbes, ABC News asked Rabushka to tape an interview. As the questioning began, Rabushka realized that all the queries he was receiving were designed to elicit some sort of downside or shortcoming of the flat tax proposal. Sensing ABC’s agenda, Rabushka made sure to couch his answers in language that would not cast an unfavorable light on his proposal – even in short sound bites. The result: none of the interview ever appeared on the ABC evening news segment.
Can the media ever learn to make its reporting objective, going wherever the facts lead? To do so would require the ability to hire students from a more diverse ideological pool. Perhaps we need to reform our colleges first.
Hm.
The media is not monolithic. If you don’t like what the Courant is doing, don’t buy it. Buy the Republican-American instead, or watch Fox instead of CNN. Better yet, watch both. Read both. I read, via the Internet, stories from over a dozen newspapers per day. I have alerts set up in Google News to send me an email with a link whenever any story about a certain person or subject comes up.
If you want the truth of something, go find it. If you have a good message and good ideas that resonate with a wide section of the populace, they’ll spread no matter what. Maybe that’s the problem, here?
I’d also point out that conservatives and conservative ideas have done quite well in America despite what you see as widespread media bias against the right.
Really, though, you’re beating a dead horse, here. Conservatives have been complaining about “media bias” ever since Dan Rather went after Nixon, despite a steady national pull to the right ever since.
It’s a little worse, and better, than you suppose. This year, the Courant backed Democrats in Connecticut’s congressional delegation across the board; it formally endorsed all Democrats and no Republicans. The paper explained editorially that it was doing so because Washington DC had become a one party town and the health of our political system required vigorous competition. That principle, applied equably, would have required the Courant to endorse all Republicans in Connecticut’s legislative races. This year, when Democrats achieved a veto proof majority in the legislature, Connecticut became officially a one party town. The number of Republicans endorsed by the Courant can be counted on the fingers of one hand. An objection may be made that Rell is, after all, a Republican, but the question you raise is: Does the paper have a liberal bias? And Rell, as everyone knows, is not a conservative. Both she and her chief aide, Lisa Moody, are inclined to barter with Democrats – not really what one needs to produce what the paper has called a vigorous opposition. So much for the principle annunciated by the paper when it decided to throw Republican legislators in Washington, none of whom were conservative, out with the wash water. The good news is that many people are abandoning such wall-eyed papers and finding their information elsewhere
Genghis,
Yup, you are correct – which is why I cancelled my subscription.
But I don’t see your objection to people who print the fact that the Courant IS biased and have the facts that back it up. Sure I can use the free market to “vote with my feet”, and I do, but you’d think with all the red ink that the Courant is accumulating, and the staff cuts they have had as a result, that those dolts would get a clue and do some fair reporting. They complain and moan about how everyone is just not reading print media anymore and I think if you give people something worthwhile to read that they will read it. No one is saying that the Courant ought to become a Right Wing newspaper, but some balanced reporting without liberal bias, or any other bias for that matter, would be incredibly refreshing. What the blog post points out though, is that unbiased reporting, or the art thereof, is just not being taught anymore in journalism school. I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly, because it is proven everyday by the trash that is being peddled as “unbiased journalism” and we see more and more opinion being confused with fact.
Even to that objection about Rell being a Republican, if memory serves, I believe the Courant endorsed DeStefano.
The main agenda of journalism as a whole when it applies to government is to let the sun shine in on the government and let the people know what is going on.
Which politcal philosophy is it that fights against letting the sun shine in on government? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the liberals.
So, I think the connection can be made between those who want an open government and those who enter the career of journalism.
It’s the people who don’t want an open government who are against the media publishing the goings on in our nation.
Chris: You may have a point about those who go into journalism as being interested in open government. Perhaps the E&P surveys include a question on that matter. I cannot remember, it being too long since I last reviewed them. That conclusion, however, cannot be reached based on an assessment that liberals are more interested in open government. The level of distrust of government traditionally has been higher among conservatives than among liberals.
It is unfortunate that, due to the partisan nature of the American political system, the party which is in power wants to stay in power, and will try to avoid scrutiny by the press to maintain power. I have more sympathy for the conservative position on that issue, however, given that I have observed that the liberal press, consciously or unconsciously, tends to go easier on liberals.
Genghis? A steady Nat’l pull to the RIGHT?
What country are you living in? There’s been more welfare spending, more illegal immigration, etc, etc. with the RINOs (Republican in Name only crowd) in power. Conservatives are very dissappointed with Pres. Bush. He couldn’t galvanize his grass roots because of his playing the liberal political GAME with the Iraqi War. The biased liberal media has done a good job keeping a Republican gvt from swinging us to the right. I’d say its been a wash. Nobody really can get anything done in DC, not even a good liberal.
i actually agree with some of what is said in the entry, but i would add one factor: money vs. idealism.
personal example: i went to work for the courant in 1976, the day after i graduated from yale. my starting pay: $8500 a year.
a loan officer laughed at me when i tried to buy a car. “you graduated from yale and that’s what you make?”
nobody asked me about my politics (although if this had happened 50 years earlier, i would have been required to be at least philosophcally a Republican. the Courant was the house organ for that partt for decades) but guess what? the republicans i graduated with wanted to go make a lot of money. i was pretty apolitical then but i was kind of an idealist. and i wasn’t real concerned about money. (obviously!) maybe conservative christians aren’t either, but, as a generalization, if you’re smart enough to get a good newspaper job you probably lean left, because your equally smart right-leaning counterpart is off making real money.