This was priceless. The writer is Michael Barone:
"I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago. "Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.
"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."
"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."
He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."
Winds has a post with a bunch of links if you're looking for the surveys that back those lopsided ratios (Hat tip: Instapundit).
That sounds good in theory, but of course it's just one persons supposed version of that conversation.... unless there's a transcript somewhere it's just heresay to me.
The article goes on to quote errors in the NYtimes. The NYtimes is a dying institution. You could argue bias, which it probably has. Howell Raines, a previous executive editor, talked in an atlantic article a year or so ago: my times, about the systematicly bad reporting that goes on at the times because of it's 'elite status'. This, of course, lends itself to bias.
But it also leads itself to slipshod journalists like Judith Miller, who merely printed pro-war articles without checking them herself. Different side of the same coin.
So, alchemist, you're saying that if surveys showed the makeup of their journalist identification as between 4:1 and 12:1 Republican vs. Democrat, the work product would be identical?
I saw an interesting HBO film on DVD called Shattered Glass, about the New Republic reporter who fabricated his stories. I actually watched it again with the director's commentary, which featured Charles Lane, the chief editor who finally fired Stephen Glass.
Throughout the film, Lane struggled to explain why everyone had believed Glass for so long. The only reason he could give: "He was our friend, and you don't assume your friend is lying."
So because he was their friend, the editors of a famous publication believed that there was a Church of George H. W. Bush Christ, whose members abstained from eating broccoli for religious reasons. That a conservative conference started with everyone agreeing that "Conservatism is dead" and then went on to drugs and group sex. Just the kind of stuff that only a cynical white liberal would believe, and there seems to have been nobody at TNR who was not a cynical white liberal.
No, I know most reporters are democrats, I'm saying about the second part: where the reporter refused to accept that 90% republican reporters could be unbiased.
As far as glass, that's not neccesarily bias,it's a magazine that didn't check their reporters resources. It's a serious problem in all strands of the media, where the rush to get the story first leads to reporting bad/flaout lies. It's hit the 'traditional' media outlets hardest lately, from NYtimes, to CBS to Newsweek.
However, Fox has made many similar mistakes, reporting news the administration has immediately forwarded to them without checking it's authenticity.
I have constantly posted that the problem with news media is that there is not enough detailed, intelligent, well-documented stories and too much "We got the story first" crap, or start a s story with unfounded accusations.
I would be perfectly willing to accept 90% republican reporters.... if they were thorough and well reported. Which is why I am willing to read stories on the weekly standard, but become outraged whenever I watch fox.
I've come to the conlclusion that everyone knows there is a media bias towards the left, it just depends on whether they choose to acknowledge it, and if that acknowledgment fits their political ideology. Most on the Right see a bias, and its visible and acknowledged by those in the middle. Polls continue to provide support for the general public at large believing in a leftward tilt of the media. The only groups that tend to disagree are your activist Left and the media members themselves.
> The only groups that tend to disagree are your activist Left
From their perspective, the media isn't biased left - it actually is biased right.
> and the media members themselves.
And from their perspective, it is right down the center.
Andy - Alas that the surveys do not agree at all. But numbers aren't a strong point for many in the media.
Alchemist gets close to something very important here:
Part of the issue, too, is that reporters are rarely if ever subject mater experts... and the notion of "journalism schools" and degrees just makes this problem worse.
I'd be less sanguine about what's next, though:
Which is great - but dude, would you really want them to be the vast preponderance of your media choices, on the order of 80:20 or more? I'm not sure I would, and I'm right wing. Way too much danger of "echo chamber" effects, whereupon transparently stupid things aren't noticed because they're never challenged by the people you work with.
One thing I've learned on Winds is that different political orientations actually see different stories. There actually is something to that diversity stuff - especially on an intellectual level, but also with respect to backgrounds and life experiences. And the modern media fails on both of those counts.