Why You Can't Trust the Press
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NewsMax.com
Aug. 30, 2001
John L. PerryMilton Mayer wrote for Harper's Magazine what has become a famous scholarly documentation, titled "How to Read the Chicago Tribune," about absolutely outrageous journalistic bias.
That was back in 1949, when the Trib wasn't too dissimilar from other newspaper giants, acutely one-sided in the practice of journalism. Today, the Chicago Tribune is a far-different newspaper, among America's most trustworthy. But media bias in this country is still alive, Cyclopean in its political conformity and all the more venomous.
Mayer's devastating analysis, more footnotes than text, affronted the Trib's publisher, Col. Robert R. McCormick, but did little to reform "The World's Greatest Newspaper" (from which the Tribune-owned television station, WGN, derives its call letters).
Taking a typical Trib news – not opinion – article, Mayer plucked apart every last morsel of the newspaper's code words, political cant and institutional idiocy.
The Chicago Tribune of more than half a century ago was an unblushing, one-sided conservative window on the narrow-minded world of its frustrated, embittered, anti-liberal, anti-Eastern, anti-British owner.
The colonel had an aversion to words, or anything else, of non-Midwestern origin. "Freight" was required to be spelled "frate." When it grew unbearably cold outside the Tribune Tower on Lake Michigan's waterfront one winter, the Trib's banner headline thundered: "Canada Sends Cold Wave." Members of organized labor were always "goons."
So blatant was the bias it was laughable. If memory serves correctly, one of the colonel's richer historical essays in the Trib editorial section was graced by a characteristically Anglophobic line that went something like this:
"With typical British duplicity, the Redcoats returned the Americans' fire."
Infuriatingly biased as it was in those days, the old Trib was still one well-edited newspaper, technically speaking, and from that aspect a pleasure to read.
After McCormick's death in 1955, the Trib began getting its act straightened out. But back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at the zenith of conservative dominance of newspapers, the big worry among graduating students at nearby Northwestern University's journalism school, named in honor of Joseph Medill, founder of the Trib, was whether they would be able to find work anywhere else that wasn't about as bad.
"Are you going to sell out?" they asked one another, reflecting the reality of the day that most American newspapers were in the hands of archly conservative, often reactionary, publishers.
How the times have changed! Today, the problem is just the reverse, a gunwale-swamping list to port – which means it is, in journalistic principle, still the same, an alarming bias toward one political point of view.
There's no denying that the American press, and this embraces network television news operations, now harbors a decidedly left-wing bias. Instead of being run by crotchety dinosaurs who at least had inherited or invested their way to financial independence, today's instrumentalities of conglomerate-controlled mass communication are largely in the callow hands of graduates of management schools who know virtually nothing about journalism and couldn't manage their way across a newsroom.
Whether they brought along the liberal bias with them from Harvard School of Business or allowed the pseudo-journalists infesting their newsrooms and editorial boards to hornswoggle them is immaterial. The upshot is a miasma of left-wing blather gushing forth in the guise of news.
Opinion articles – editorials, which speak the corporate ownership's view, or personal columns, such as this – are the proper place for opinions, left, right or off the wall.
Ideally, Americans would be presented a broad rainbow of opinion. The CommentMax section of this NewsMax.com Web site is perhaps the best array of varying political opinion to be found in one place in American journalism today. Sad to say, most newspaper readers are surfeited with nothing but leftist bias.
It's worse in the broadcast media. Chief offenders among the electronic liberal propagandists are CBS-TV News and the taxpayer-underwritten Public Broadcasting Service (TV) and National Public Radio, which are easy enough to avoid, as increasing numbers of fed-up Americans are doing. A notable exception on television is Fox News Channel, which although conservative at its base does a right fair job of enabling a range of differing viewpoints to be heard.
The left-wing bias permeates the whole skein of the news coverage of America's elitist, mainstream media, print and broadcast.
It's the same lopsidedness as a world of old-time Chicago Tribunes, only liberal instead of conservative and many times worse because the reach of today's news media far exceeds anything Bertie McCormick or William Randolph Hearst ever dreamed.
Periodically, someone from within the newsies' ranks will pipe up and say how awful this is. Little happens and life in Liberal Land journalism goes on as before. Such a throat-clearing occurred this week when columnist Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post, of all places, raised the specter of liberal bias at the New York Times, whose famous motto might as well be amended to "All the News That Fits Our Bias." It's well he did, though nothing will come of it.
Even so, here in one of the rare precincts of American journalism – NewsMax.com – where free expression of honest opinion is not only cherished and protected, but expected, it's appropriate to take a deeper look at what's wrong with mainstream American news media and why so many people wouldn't trust them any farther than they could throw them.
There is an entrenched left-wing bias. It's there, no argument, only embarrassed regret.
The critical issue, though, is whether a journalist's political persuasion, left or right, means that person is incapable of doing straight-arrow journalism. No, it doesn't.
All reporters have some sort of personal political viewpoint. They'd not be worth having if they were intellectual eunuchs. There are indeed personally conservative and personally liberal journalists who can, and actually do, report honestly and perceptively.
It is the ones who forget, if they ever knew, what journalism's role is in a democratic society – to provide the factual grist for the mills of informed opinions in the populace – who poison the well by perverting their reporting skills to promote their political agendas.
Unprofessional, pronounced and widespread as it is, indulged political bias in purportedly factual journalism is far from being the totality of the problem. There are other components that conspire to make things as bad as they are (worse, if you only knew):
Genuine journalism is a lost art.
Fifty years ago there were three premier j-schools – the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the University of Missouri School of Journalism at Columbia, Mo., and the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York City.
Today, there's not a major journalism school left – they have corrupted themselves into "communications" schools – that's worth the outlandish price of sending your youngster there.
These latter-day j-schools are so polluted by the influence of "broadcast journalism" – an oxymoron if ever there was – that many of the better newspapers shy away from hiring their precious products, preferring to take aboard graduates who have instead received a first-rate liberal-arts education (that's a different kind of "liberal" than the political kind).
Editors figure they can pound some practical journalism skills into the heads of those kids, but they haven't the time, resources or patience to give them a well-rounded education or to teach them ethics and how to cut square corners in their thinking.
What's filling up the ranks of contemporary journalism is a flood of non-journalist journalists.
Government-run education has become anything but education, beginning in grammar school and on through high school and into college. So it's no surprise the ersatz journalists haven't been educated on what the world is about, how it works or how one subject relates to the next. Ask them to localize a national or international story, and you get these blank looks. When the airhead, hair-blown anchors read the news on television it's news to them all right – they haven't heard of half that stuff before and are lucky if they get the place names pronounced correctly.
They ask questions not from knowledge but from ignorance. They take notes like recording secretaries and stick microphones under people's noses and ask, "How does it feel ... ?" or they demand, "Quickly, now ... your thoughts."
When a significant story does come along they don't have the educational background to recognize it for what it is.
That's part of the blight brought on by entertainment-oriented broadcast journalism, in which beginners aspire to be celebrities, not reporters of facts and interpreters of what those facts mean to the lives of the locals.
Then there is the arrogance, the unspeakably overweening arrogance, the condescension, the holier-than thou, smarter-than-thou smugness they can scarcely contain. If you haven't caught that by reading and watching the news media, wait till you have the privilege of being interviewed. If you don't come away from the experience feeling used and worth about 2 cents, quick, contact the Guinness Book of World Records. You may be a first.
And there's sloth. Fed by unjustified arrogance, and in turn feeding it, is plain, old-fashion laziness. It used to be said that someone was "triflin'." The word still fits. These newer generations of wannabe journalists just don't like hard work. Tough, because that's 90 percent of what journalism is.
And there's the herd instinct. Propelled by their own well-deserved feelings of insecurity and coveting celebrity status at least as monumental, and phony, as that of the Great Ones they hope to interview someday, the counterfeit journalists tend to swarm. They don't know which way they're going until they find out where everyone else in the pack is going. On their values scale, the worst possible sin is to be different from the rest.
Have you ever wondered why so many news stories and newscasts and commentaries sound like they were stamped from the same cookie cutter? No sinister mastermind is crouching back there behind the scenes, pulling strings and issuing orders. What you are seeing is the herd instinct. Consult any good border collie.
Perhaps the most grievous of all is the prevailing culture of self-indulgent amorality. In the past couple of generations, American parents and public schools have been participating in the un-education of the young, ushering in the belief that anything, anywhere, anytime they want it is OK. That there is no accepted morality. That there no responsibilities, only excuses. No accountability, only the cult of victimology.
Solutions, they have been inculcated to believe, lie with the government, not individuals, not families. The concept of a person taking control of his own life and making a success of it is, to them, a political incorrectness to be snickered at. It is no longer news, although it stands out in such distinction. It is not even to be reported, for it is not part of the dumbed-down norm of mediocrity into which Americans are now expected to fit so conveniently and passively.
Little wonder that the new crops of journalists find it so boring, so un-cool to have to report with diligence on reality around them.
Those, then, are the typical journalists with the typical mind-sets who have cost journalism its credibility. Those are the incompetents who bring the day's news to so many millions of Americans.
About the time the allure of broadcast news – not as bad originally as most of it is now – began eating away at newspaper penetration (percentage of households subscribing) and revenues (based on those circulation figures), editors who forgot what journalism is supposed to do in a democracy frantically sought out consultants who knew less than those hiring them.
The suckered editors and publishers were handed one nutty prescription for salvation after another. What it resulted in was newspapers that forsake news and spewed out cotton-candy features and how-to-cope stories. "News you can use" – no thinking required – replaced real news reported factually and written so the hometown folks could understand what it means to them where they live and with which they could think through their own solutions to challenging problems.
Surprise! Circulation penetration continued to drop like a rock. Learning nothing from being burned, newspaper executives poured still more money into more of the same folly, with more of the same destructive results.
Editors enamored by the fallacies of focus groups convinced themselves, and their bean-counters, that they were giving the readers what they wanted.
They were all wet. Consumers of news may not have been able to express their feelings with crystal clarity, but they knew what they wanted – and weren't getting.
They still want it – and they're still not getting it from the conventional, left-captured news media.
Ideally, all one would have to do to get a balanced diet of news and opinion would be to pick up a single newspaper, view a single TV news "show" or log onto a single Internet site.
But because the conventional news media have made such a botch of things, people are turning to a number of alternative news sources for that balanced diet, which is a whole lot more wholesome than a one-sided look at the world they've been getting.
Those long-denied needs are now being understood by the new media – cable news networks and Internet sites such as the one you are reading. Honest efforts are under way to meet those needs by bringing to the fore important stories and points of view that the elitist media, for whatever reasons, are ignoring, burying or twisting to conform with leftist precepts.
In the new media, warts and wens of imperfection that embellish all start-up enterprises are still around, but growing fewer. Professionalism and honest sophistication are quickly catching up with initial flaws of exuberance.
In the process, lively written, old-fashioned, blurt-it-out, hard-news journalism, augmented by informed interpretative reporting (not editorializing), is being resurrected. People love it. They're flocking to it. What they have discovered is a cafeteria-style presentation, from a variety of sources, of information and opinion they cannot find in the mainstream press.
Millions now tap into NewsMax.com, where only a couple of years ago there were only several thousand. Fox News Channel has Cable News Network wetting its pants, flailing around, desperate to do the obvious but locked in the death grip of its own left-wing bias.
The good news is that "news you can trust" – as distinguished from "news you can use" – is finally on the way back in. Just give it enough time.
The marketplace of ideas, which the Founding Fathers counted on to keep this unique, new nation on course ideologically, is proving to be a marketplace of the profitable.
Free enterprise in news and opinion, like free enterprise in the economy, is making a comeback against the collectivist manipulators who presume to think they know what's best for everyone, but can't grope their own way out of the dark they've plunged themselves into.
In his own entrepreneurial way, Bertie McCormick may even be looking down from atop the great Tribune Tower in the journalistic sky – and discovering genuine journalism works after all.
John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is senior editor and a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.