“But what threw me off a bit was the implied assumption that the news media (I assume that’s who they mean when they say “media elite”) should be impartial.”

Confession: I complained this morning that the media was not impartial. I can only stand the Jim Lehrer Newshour. They do the best at just saying what has happened. And if something is partial to one side, they will go on to say something in favor of the other side.

But now you’ve given me something to think about, darn it all….

I’ve got no problem with media outlets that have an acknowledged and understood bias. When you watch Fox News, or read the Kos, everyone knows what you’re getting.

What about Time magazine? I think they trade on a public perception of neutrality, that they would say that about themselves, and the general public would agree. I think that perception, however, belies editorial choices that hold a distinct political perspective. In the past 12 months, they’ve put Obama on the cover 7 times (1 shared with McCain, 2 shared with Clinton). McCain has been on the cover 3 times (1 shared with Obama). The rest of the covers from McCain date back to 1999, 2000, when McCain was the darling of the media for a few years because of his movement away from conservative ideals. Once he became a serious, and conservative, candidate, the tenor of the coverage changed.

Those are editorial choice, but I don’t think they’re made intentionally. There’s no smoke-filled room where reporters meet to decide how to best advance liberal candidates. I do think, and there is data to back this up, that the culture of journalism fosters a liberal mindset. Based on a Pew research study, 7% of newsroom journalists in national media outlets identify themselves as conservative (I’m guessing almost 100% of those work at Fox). 34% identify themselves as liberal.

If that’s the political temperature in the newsroom, then the media’s presumption of what neutrality looks like deserves some scrutiny. I think Time magazine might very well be attempting to strike a neutral balance in their coverage of the election, but they don’t do it from an informed perspective, because they’ve failed to staff themselves with anyone informed from the opposing perspective.

I agree with Mike that many media voices — especially the major networks, CNN and newpapers such as the LA Times — would consider themselves neutral or unbiased in covering the political scene, but behave otherwise. This isn’t a nefarious plot but rather a culture in which certain perspectives are considered reasonable and reality-based and others are not, yielding reporting that (consciously or not) definitely uncercuts conservative positions. (Bernard Goldberg’s book “Bias” addressed this quite
engagingly, although he took a lot of heat for what he said.) Fox News of course leans the other direction, which is hardly “fair and balanced” either. On Labor Day I watched a CNN reporter who had flown to Anchorage in the wake of Sarah Palin’s nomination. Barak Obama had just made a strong statement that the daughter’s unplanned pregnancy was off the political table, but the reporter spun her coverage of this event in a most unflattering and politically charged way. (I should add that in a roundtable that immediately followed, Bill Bennett appropriately ripped Wolf Blitzer a new one over the tone of the Anchorage dispatch.)

In many ways I agree with Aly that it’s less annoying to listen to someone whose viewpoint is front and center. Every so often I enjoy listening to KPFK (90.7), which is as unabashedly left-wing (and proud of it) as Rush Limbaugh is right-wing. Hey, at least we have a choice.

Hmm.. before too long, if Obama wins, and most especially if the Dems get a filibuster-proof majority, you won’t have that choice.

The “fairness” doctrine will be re-enacted. Since right leaning talk radio is so enormously more profitable than left leaning radio (due to ability to attract and keep an audience), broadcasters will have to decide whether to match every (profitable) right leaning hour with an unprofitable left leaning hour…. or just can the whole thing altogether, and go back to a neutral format of some sort.

It was the rescinding of the “fairness” doctrine that made modern talk radio possible, and the “fairness” doctrine’s renewal would probably end it.

Its OK, though, I love listening to recipes and discussions about pets and cars as I drive to work. And you have to love those weather reports.

BTW… if you read the wiki article on Walter all the way to the bottom, you’ll learn he wasn’t the neutral voice he pretended to be, either. Which was obvious to anyone who noticed what he didn’t report….

Now now…

If anything, I think we’ve learned that oppressive circumstances amp up the fighting spirit. If Obama wins, right-leaning folk will have PLENTY to talk about, and they will not allow their voices to be silenced. I seem to remember plenty of right wing media success during the 1990’s…

As Jeff Goldblum so eloquently stated in Jurassic Park… “Life finds a way…”

If history holds, whoever wins the white house gives away the majority in congress at the next midterm elections.

Besides… and I know this statement might come back to haunt me, and it’s also in no means meant to be an endorsement, but I think McCain is going to win.

Nice to think that bad things won’t happen and free speech will out… And yes, there was plenty of right wing media success in the 1990s, because of FCC policy changes in the 1980s.

Until the FCC cancelled the fairness doctrine (which was never legislatively mandated, just a regulation under general authority of the FCC), in the massive Reagan deregulation policy, talk radio as we know it now could not exist. That’s why there was a Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s broadcasting nationally… it had JUST become possible for such a thing to exist.

Rush is often given credit for more or less singlehandedly ushering in the era of talk radio, and he deserves it… but it would not have been possible without Reagan’s deregulation first.

If Congress passes an actual legislation, and Obama signs it (you know he would), it will be much harder for a successive Congress to undo… even assuming a massive Republican resurgence at the mid-term elections. Obama would be sure to veto any such legislation. If he is a two-termer, it will be a minimum of 8 years before it can be undone.

This is not paranoia. It is the explicit, publicly stated intent of Pelosi and Reid to pursue such legislation immediately if Obama wins.

In the meantime: if YOU want to pay, out of your own pocket, for an advertisement on the public airways in favor of either candidate, you may not do so, now, thanks to McCain’s folly, “campaign finance reform”, which he will have cause to regret, I fear.

The Supreme Court upheld it by a 5-4 decision. (Incredibly, Bush seems to have signed it expecting the Court to overturn it, so that he would look like he was in favor of “reform”.) So much for free speech, and “it can’t happen here”. It may or may not turn out to be a “slippery slope”, but it surely is the camel’s nose in the tent. And when the “fairness doctrine” was still in force, before 1985, the Court (our robed masters) upheld it consistently as the proper province of the FCC, despite the lack of legislative intent to support it.

The new “fairness doctrine” will apply only to radio, most likely, since on the whole the Left is perfectly happy with the balance of coverage they get from TV and newspapers. As a sop to free speech advocates, and a smokescreen, it’s likely that some TV version of it will exist, but it will be worded in such a form as to change very little, while the radio version will simply put right-leaning radio out of business.

I’d like to believe that the Right “will not allow their voices to be silenced”, but it would be a good many years before the law could be changed, once enacted. About all they could do is send letters to the editor, and use the internet.

The one exception to the wholesale cancellation of Right-leaning radio would probably be Rush, whose show is so profitable that many stations would keep him on, possibly, and just eat the the loss of the three hours of “balancing coverage”.

This is the quota-based Left at its very best.

I hope it’s clear from my post (but maybe not), but I’m not in favor of the Fairness Doctrine, purely from a pragmatic standpoint (and I hope you all appreciate how incredibly difficult it is for me to view anything from a purely pragmatic standpoint). Neutrality is just not something that is humanly possible, outside severe autism. Idealistically speaking (and as an admitted liberal), the philosophical idea of utilizing the public’s airwaves to inform and enrich the public (disinterestedly) is wonderful…I just don’t think it’s within human power to do so. I’d rather know up front where everyone is coming from so that I can measure those analyses against my own acknowledged bias. Get it all on the table, baby.

Chad: You may be right. If so, I think McCain’s win will signal the last gasp of pre-reformed conservatism. There are just so many factors (a for instance) that, so far, conservatives have ignored and that together equal diminishing returns (to their peril). If, as George Will contends, conservatives value freedom above equality and liberals value equality over freedom, I think we might be seeing the “come to Jesus moment” for both. I hope so. The two go hand in hand, as anyone with half a brain and a well-intentioned heart can see.

Blah, blah, blah. Too…much…tequila…

Aly, I tend to agree with Will on this, but on the freedom/equality front, the two don’t go “hand in hand” unless you believe we’re all the same. We aren’t. With freedom, different people will have different results, which is the kind of “inquality” despised by the left, and which is why, at bottom, they despise freedom wherever they think it gets in the way of “equality”.

We are equal in “value”, and in deserving the protection of the law from crime, and in getting one vote each… i.e., we are politically equal, but economic and social inequality is a permanent human condition, and every attempt to make it otherwise so far (by government fiat) has created more evil than any inequality that was the “problem”.

Compare the French revolution to the American one. The first was primarily about “equality”, the latter primarily about “freedom”. How many heads were lost in a vain search for “equality”? In the twentieth century, upwards of 100 million people were murdered by regimes pursuing some kind of “equality”, but certainly not freedom.

I recommend three books on this topic:

A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell

and

AThe origins of totalitarian democracy by J. L Talmon

and

The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

And I’d point out that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Left is moderating ANY of its positions on any major topic, while the Right does indeed seem to be in flux, as witnessed by the fact that nearly every Obama position is quite left, while McCain is a mixed conservative… some would say mixed up. (For example: he wants to appoint “constructionist” judges, who are the types who be likely to declare McCain/Feingold to be an infringement of the 1st Amendment. There is no evidence he senses the contradiction.)

These two imperatives, freedom vs equality (of other than a pure political sort, which is not what the Left has in mind) are in permanent conflict. I might wish it were otherwise… but wishes do not change the facts, nor impugn my “well-intentioned heart”.

yeesh… I can’t believe I said “who be likely”.

sigh

Looks like I have some reading to do, Phil! Now for that BN gift card…

I don’t believe we’re all the same — that if given the same opportunity we will achieve the same results. I do, however, believe that where possible, our social institutions (including, but not limited to, government) can and should work to limit unfairness that stands in the way of equal opportunity. In what ways this should be done is up for grabs (as is a definition of “unfairness” that is broadly agreed on), but I hope everyone’s best ideas will be considered and debated.

By suggesting that freedom and equality go hand in hand, I had in mind the personal stories of many former oppressors who confess that their efforts to perpetuate inequality limited their own freedom (I was thinking particularly of John Perkins’s story told in Let Justice Roll Down and Bishop Tutu’s work on the So. African Truth & Reconciliation Commission). I think our freedoms are hollow when they are bought at the expense of others’.

I chose my words poorly, and for that I am very sorry. I didn’t at all mean that anyone who disagrees with me is ill-intentioned (though that’s what I implied, quite heavy-handedly). I try, as a rule, not to make sweeping statements that insist my point of view is self-evident…but occasionally my inner idealogue wins the day. I apologize!

I’ll start with A Conflict of Visions…a little more affordable than the other two. Thanks for the tip Phil…looking forward to it.

I think you’ll be impressed at how very careful Thomas Sowell is to shelve his presuppositions, and simply try to describe the two main competing perspectives he sees. In his other writings, you’d have little trouble discerning which approach is his… but if you don’t start out knowing his perspectives, you may have trouble telling which he supports. There are subtle hints, if you start out knowing what to look for… and that’s it. I was actually disappointed… I wanted him to CHOOSE one. He does so elsewhere, but not in this book.

And I’ve found it to be extremely helpful in understanding why seemingly disparate interest groups band together politically, and in articulating why the two main sides in these ideological debates behave as they do.

Hey Ali, it was the tequila talking… are you a mean drunk? It’s OK, I didn’t feel punched in the nose or blackeyed, although I did learn a new smiley face to show that:

‡+(

Whadday think?

Picasso is in no danger from me….

Obviously, oppression is wrong, and should not be sanctioned by governmental power. Generally, however, it is not the combination of freedom and “unfettered capitalism” that creates oppression. It’s far more likely for the government to create problems by meddling in the market to create particular outcomes, fail to create those outcomes, or create new problems that are worse, and then blame “capitalists” for some excess or other, and bringing on a new round of regulation. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen regulators blame their failure on “not enough regulation”.

Here’s an example. There’s a link near the bottom of that post that takes you to more discussion on the problem.

I’m inclined to see “equal opportunity” as an outcome itself, not a condition of a society that can be determined by government, outside of limiting the most egregious kinds of abuse, like failure to honor contracts, violent suppression of competitors, etc. There are simply things that government cannot directly fix; the most it can do is remove obvious barriers, and try by incentive, rather than fiat, to encourage good behavior. And even when it’s just incentives, as opposed to threats of legal action, there is great danger of abuse. The lobbying mess in Washington is precisely because government takes in so much money, and spends so much money, and taxes so much, with so many ifs/ands and buts, that the main incentive in operation is to game the system.

to point.