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Television Rooting out the media
bias
By RAYMOND SCHROTH
All governments lie, said the
20th centurys most idealistic muckraker, I.F. Stone; but, he added,
they also reveal a great deal about themselves. For a long while he
had been growing deaf and couldnt go to congressional hearings; so he
took the time to carefully read the transcripts of everything that had been
said -- and made discoveries that the regular Washington reporters, those who
would follow the president around the rose garden taking notes or who got
scoops by playing tennis with White House aides, never noticed.
Robert Fisk, the great British correspondent who covers the Middle
East, says in the film War Reporters that the only approach to
covering a conflict is to presume, They all lie. Believe no one. Go
in without any preconceived views and dig, and listen to everyone. Then tell
what you see and what you think.
So I was not surprised that Fisk, au-thor of Pity the
Nation (1990), the classic account of Israels 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, was among the first to condemn the high toll of civilian casualties in
the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan.
Some would say that Stone and Fisk, who, when they dig, usually
find something wrong, are biased. They are against the
government.
Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS-TV News correspondent, has
created a publishing phenom-enon, about a half-year on the bestseller list,
with Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
(Regnery) -- largely because thousands, maybe millions, of viewers think
hes right.
The networks and the media elites, he says, slant the
news to the left.
First, I -- and the standard journalism ethics textbook -- would
make the distinction between bias and values. Every journalist, we hope, has
values, beliefs that form the basis of his/her moral judgments. A bias is a
prejudice, a prejudgment that influences an unfair or distorted report.
Do the media -- which include TV, radio, newspapers, magazines,
film, and now the Internet -- present a distorted picture of reality? Of
course. It is the nature of entertainment media to feed fantasy, provide escape
from reality, and it is the nature of advertising to sell us products, many of
which we do not need.
But it is the moral obligation of the news media to give us the
information that guides our political decisions. If the news is distorted or
incomplete, democracy will fail.
Goldbergs saga begins in 1996 when, he says, after
complaining in-house that CBS News had a liberal slant, he became so irate with
a CBS Evening News item dissecting presidential candidate Steve Forbes
flat tax proposal, that he published an attack on his own network on the op-ed
page of The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 13, 1996).
The reporter, Eric Engberg, whom he identifies as a longtime
friend, he says, used loaded words like scheme,
elixir, and wacky to demean the idea. He interviewed
economists, but in a way that set up the case against the tax rather than
allowing the viewer to decide for himself.
Goldbergs attack on his own employer became a cause
célèbre, he says. There were in-house letters of support,
from Andy Rooney and others he declines to identify; but, in general, he became
the office leper. Dan Rather, who used to be his friend, was
furious. Indeed, throughout the book, Goldberg -- who abhors all
bias -- cannot mention Rathers name without an audible snarl:
But a few years ago I got to meet the other Dan Rather, the one behind
the anchorman smile. The one the public doesnt get a chance to see. The
one who operates with the cool precision of a Mafia hit man who kisses you on
the right cheek before he puts a bullet through your eyeball. To put it
kindly, the Rather Goldberg portrays is a liar.
Goldberg goes on to develop -- or inflate -- his 800-word op-ed
piece into a 223-page book, with examples of other issues on which the biased
media cannot be trusted.
For years in the 1980s, news reports portrayed the homeless
romantically, as normal, white, middle-class unfortunates, huddling by the
millions in the Christmas snow. In truth, their numbers were exaggerated by
advocates for homeless people, Goldberg writes. The General Accounting Office
estimated that there were at most 600,000. In reality, Goldberg writes, they
were drunks, addicts, schizophrenics, largely responsible for their own
fate.
AIDS is, in fact, a disease that, in this country, is largely
limited to homosexuals, junkies who use dirty needles, their sex partners and
their children who can inherit the virus. Yet, says Goldberg, the gay lobby,
knowing that this small part of the population could never command public
sympathy by itself, has sold the media the idea that AIDS is a general epidemic
that threatens everyone: No one is safe. Oprah Winfrey was convinced to
proclaim, Research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals
could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. Thats
by 1990.
Goldberg moves swiftly through a number of other issues where
journalists show their bias by not writing about them enough: Women
work, he writes, and thus neglect their children not because they
must but because they just prefer to work. Maybe the Quran really
does encourage terrorism! Otherwise, he asks why arent there Jewish
suicide bombers? (It does not occur to Goldberg that the Israelis dont
need suicide bombers when they have USA-paid-for helicopters and tanks.)
A more substantial conservative critique is William McGowans
Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American
Journalism (Encounter). Covering some of the same ground, but in more
depth, McGowan argues that in their commitment to the multicultural ideology,
media institutions have both compromised journalistic standards and
consistently misrepresented or ignored complex questions on race,
homosexuality, feminism and immigration.
This is not because journalists are consciously biased, but
because they come not from a cross-section of society but from the
well-educated, secularist upper and middle classes and naturally share common
assumptions about affirmative action, womens rights, abortion and,
sometimes, the irrelevance of religious belief.
As a result, The Washington Post, for example,
didnt see or wouldnt say that lowering the standards of police
recruitment to make the force more diverse put a lot of black crooks in
uniform. Other media have been blind to the cultural damage resulting from
unrestricted immigration and the illiteracy of a generation of Hispanic youth
raised on bilingual education.
Goldberg and McGowan score some points. Praising both books,
civil-libertarian Nat Hentoff writes that he himself was almost denied a
National Press Foundation lifetime award simply because he was pro-life.
And even liberal Catholics cringe in occasional disgust when
pundits like The Nations Kath Polite and, recently, The
New York Times Bill Keller, cant type words like
God, or Catholic church, without foaming at the mouth.
And the infamous review in The New Republic (Jan. 21) by Daniel
Jonah Gold Hagen of 10 church/holocaust books reeks with a profound animus
toward Catholicism.
But to imagine that the media are collectively liberal is to
imagine that The New York Times and The Washington
Post are liberal because they are to the left of The
Wall Street Journal. There is, in fact, compared to Europe, a very
narrow range of opinion in the American press and on TV, clustered in the
extreme center.
The media are no more leftist than the handful of big capitalist
conglomerates that own them: AT&T, AOL/Time Warner, Viacom (CBS), General
Electric (NBC), Walt Disney (ABC), and the News Corporation, where one man,
Rupert Murdoch, sets the right-wing political line for FOX News, the
conservative Weekly Standard, the trashy New York Post and
tabloids all over the English-speaking world.
Their collective bias is pro-business-government-establishment --
most evident when any administration wants to spend billions on weapons, wage a
war and deny the existence of civilian casualties.
Finally, a word about the ethics of Goldbergs original
column. CBS did not fire Goldberg, he stayed another four years and resigned
with his pension in 2001 -- and then wrote another Wall Street Journal
broadside against Dan. But was it right for a member of the CBS
News team to attack his own colleagues in another medium?
Its hard for me to imagine there were not better ways of
expressing dissent. At an editorial board meeting, circulating an internal
letter, even politely in an interview. We all have to be willing to take risks
to save our souls, to confront our bosses and colleagues -- especially on
questions of great moment where both the public welfare and our own integrity
are at stake. If we get nowhere and if it will serve the greater good, we
should go public.
But first, resign.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is Jesuit Community Professor of
the Humanities at St. Peters College in Jersey City, N.J. His latest
book, Fordham: A History and Memoir, has just been published by Loyola
Press. His e-mail address is raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, June 21,
2002
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