A New Approach to "Media Bias"

Surprisingly, the shrill accusation of liberal bias in the media has not been too present on the scene this election cycle. There has been a lot of talk about bias against certain candidates (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards) and towards others (McCain and Obama), but the discussion has by and large stayed away from the divisive claim that all mainstream media is in the hands of the "liberal cultural elite." In fact, the frothy-mouthed fury that hard right media figures are showing towards John McCain is even making some of these stalwarts toss their support to the democrats; the media that they work so hard to label "liberal" is paradoxically broadcasting more liberal endorsements as a result of their irrational vitriol.

Regardless of the recent silence, however, this lion of an argument is sleeping and will certainly awake the closer we get to November. It's really a complex topic and I don't claim to be able to defang it here, but I want to preemptively put a thought about this eternal topic out there before a passing gazelle (or donkey, as the case may be) disturbs the lion's sleep.

A couple weekends ago I had the privilege to spend an evening chatting with Jared Menendez and his buddy, a radio journalist from North Carolina. It was the night of the South Carolina primary, and inevitably the talk turned to politics. The journalist made a couple of comments that I found very interesting: first, he said that liberals were having a hard time making their political talk entertaining and engaging; second, he said that liberal bias in the media is a well-known and indisputable fact. The proof for this claim: surveys show that journalists tend to overwhelming vote democratic on election day.

Before moving on to my main point, a brief question: is the fact (hearsay) that a majority of journalists favor one political party in their personal life evidence that their reporting is biased toward the same party? It's a legitimate question to be sure, but I don't think it conclusively proves a thing. It's like saying that doctors tend to vote for republicans, therefore you can't rely on them to get you unbiased information about abortion and stem cell research. Private lives and careers must not be taken for the same thing. Journalistic integrity, which I do believe exists in the majority of people who have chosen this as a career and have spent years in J school, prevents rogue reporters from injecting their opinions into their coverage.

So there is a quick and dirty refutation of the second point. I want to get back to the first point, however, and start off by asking the basic question: what is bias? Is it the fact that some anchorman reading the news happens to have voted for John Kerry in 2004? Or is it structural? Media scholars traditionally examine the idea of media bias by recording and comparing the air time spent addressing select topics. For instance, if CNN spends 45 minutes in their evening broadcast addressing problems in the health care system and only 5 addressing the merits of tax cuts for the wealthy, this is judged as liberal bias. (for more on the methodology of this stuff, any book by Robert McChesney will do marvelously.) There are a lot of problems with this method. First, the poles of "liberal" and "conservative" are entirely relative - what was moderate 30 years ago is flaming liberal today. Second, how can a reliable rubric be created to analyze the position of an article on a newspaper page and the weight given to it by the editors? Does a 16 point font give a headline 25% more weight than a 14 point font? The whole affair starts to look really ridiculous really quickly. There are a lot of statisticians out there saying that all this measuring of time/importance of coverage is a lot of bunk, and I'm inclined to agree, as interesting as some of the finding are. (On American networks, for example, nearly 50% of air time is dedicated to human interest stories. You know, like the kid who got stuck in a washing machine in Kentucky.)

Despite the problems associated with actually proving media bias, however, I agree with my journalist acquaintance - republicans have effectively hoodwinked many people into believing that the media is a vast liberal machine. And many of those who are suspicious of the cultural elites feeding them their news are the ones who tune in to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and the other guys. Conservative talk is a huge industry and networks like FOX freely trample on the idea of fair and balanced coverage. On the face of it, it seems quite odd indeed that conservatives complain about bias in the media when conservative voices dominate the public discussion. It's like Christians in America playing the victim card, another unfortunately common and comical irony in our modern culture.

So why have liberals failed to "entertain and engage" audiences? Why do conservatives keep winning both the media wars and the war over our perception of media despite their claim that they're being bullied by the liberal elite? I think that some of the answer has to do with the structure of our primary means of dispersing information, namely TV and radio.

When I was in college, I took a great media course with a New York Times writer named Jeffrey Scheuer. He had just published a book called The Sound Bite Society
that brought complexity theory and philosophy to bear on the topic of bias. It was a formative read for me and really got me thinking about this whole issue.

Here's the thesis in a nutshell: conservatives are winning the media wars because the media themselves are inherently conservative. Let's say that again differently: conservatives have the edge because the way people get their information is fundamentally, structurally better suited for the conservative message.

How does the right-wing define itself? It is a political ideology that argues for decreased government involvement on most levels (your sex life excluded, apparently), strong national security, "traditional" social values, less complicated red tape and bureaucracy, a return to the good old days, etc. Fundamentally, it is an argument for small government. The conservative philosophy is - no denigration implied - one that values simplicity. Cut taxes; cut gov't regulation; cut welfare rolls - it is a political ideology based on eliminating perceived excesses and returning to the foundational social principles of this country, like strong families, man-woman marriages, etc. The liberal philosophy, on the other hand, thrives in nuances. Our modern society, it argues, is too complex to return to the halcyon days of yesteryear; we need a strong central government to keep corporate interests in check and to administer social welfare programs. On the question of taxes, abortion, health care reform and a lot of others issues, the liberal answer is "yes, but.." while the conservative one is "no." Fundamentally, it is more complex than conservative philosophy, and again, no value judgments implied with the terms "simplicity and complexity" (I'd prefer pizza to foie gras any day).

So how does this relate to the media? The primary way millions of people get their news is through the television and radio. Oceans of ink have been spilled criticizing the role of television in modern societies (my favorite commentator is the wonderfully curmudgeonly Pierre Bourdieu) and I don't want to start down that path. Needless to say, TV and radio (but particularly TV) are coercive forms of media - they set the pace that the passive viewer must follow. Not quite understanding an argument? Too bad, we're off to the next topic. Where print media allow the audience to take it at their own pace and process things at their own leisure, TV pushes you along. Add this structural reality to the commercial apparatus behind the major networks and you have a simple system of transmission that, according to Scheuer, inherently favors simple messages. Besides C-SPAN, cable networks spit out their stories and their messages quickly, and in recent years politics has become the art of the sound bite. ("Read my lips: no more new taxes"; "I'm the decider"; "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"...)

In Scheuer's estimation, Al Franken is not failing on Air America because he isn't bright or entertaining enough; he is failing because the message is not suited to that medium. Conversely, put Limbaugh in print and his arguments will seem dull and uninspired (they really do!). This is because the screaming heads thrive on a platform that pushes their rants into the minds of their audience without the inconvenience of push and pull, nuance, or critical debate.

Next time a pundit reaches for the "liberal bias" canard, keep in mind the medium on which their message is being broadcast. Also take comfort in the fact that our arsenal of news media keep changing. As Ruxton indicated in his thoughtful post, the bloggosphere offers new possibilities for the transmission of information and the stimulation of critical dialog; indeed, the internet in general has this effect on our public life. It is the ultimately complex format, so perhaps in the future we'll start to see the complex messages breaking through all the noisy sound bites.

Update: Prima Facie Politics II

There's a great article in this week's Newsweek about the irrationality of voters that includes a nice little synopsis of recent research. Guess what the number one recognizable fact about George HW Bush was right before the 1992 election? The fact that he loathed broccoli. A close second was the name of his dog. Broken down issue by issue, an average of only 15% knew what the candidate's positions were.