How come we don’t hear about ‘conservative media bias’? - Thomas F. Schaller - my commentary

Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.

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Liberal media bias.

So incessant is this complaint from conservatives that the three words string together as one, like Holy Roman Empire. But like the old saw about that infamous regime being neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, liberal media bias is largely a misnomer. (So we have his thesis, that liberal media bias is a misnomer. From this we would expect that the author will demonstrate that 1) the media, i.e., the mainstream predominant news and information shows, are not tilted toward leftwing bias, that 2) there is a substantial and pervasive conservative-biased news media, that 3) Those media outlets dominate the conventional media outlets, and that 4) Those news outlets are masquerading as unbiased news. Let's see how he does.)

Yes: The opinion media (The opinion media is a subset of the media. He's moving the goalposts.) 

generally skew liberal on social issues related to abortion, gay rights, religion and maybe — maybe — guns. But that’s about the extent of it.

On issues of war and peace, taxes and spending and government regulation, the corporate-owned American media are frequently anything but liberal. (Frequently? How often is that? Remember, he needs to demonstrate that there is substantial conservative media bias.) 

Of course, avowedly liberal confines such as The Nation or The American Prospect magazines, left-wing blogs, or the superb MSNBC weekend shows hosted by Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry regularly feature reports or commentaries about American poverty, homelessness, economic inequality, prison conditions, child welfare or domestic violence. But across the nation, mainstream coverage of such issues tends to be spotty. (This is partly true. When there is a Republican president, there are regular stories about poverty, disease, and crime. But since Obama has been in office, those reports have dropped dramatically. This is in itself leftwing bias, with the media attempting to hide the failures of this president.)

Why? Because producers know Americans don’t want to have to think about reportage on these national problems. Sordid stories about the Kardashians sell magazines and draw eyes and ears to radio, TV and the Internet far better than do sordid tales of bereft orphans. (This is not about bias, it's a commentary about American's taste. But beyond that, entertainment is a subset of the media as well. We are looking for a conservative imbalance across the newsmedia, remember?)

Take the supposed problem of political correctness in the media, yet another red (or Red America) herring. ("Yet another?" This is the first time he's used the term, and the way he uses it implies that he has documented several of them before. We have actually not seen one yet, for a red herring is "a logical fallacy that misleads or detracts from the actual issue." Since the author has quoted no one employing questionable rhetoric, he is misusing the term.) 

The positive portrayals of gay Americans in the news — or in movies, television shows like “Modern Family” or the clever new Kindle ad where a gay man and a straight woman both mention their husbands — aren’t evidence of a politically correct bias. They’re evidence of profit-correctness by publishers and producers who know gay Americans are consumers, too. ("Positive portrayals?" So can the author name a single negative portrayal? By the way, there's a difference between "positive portrayals" of gays in marketing [which are corporate choices in how they will spend their advertising dollars and are not examples of media bias], and the content of news shows. News is news. The content of that news is where we find evidence of bias. If the news is portraying gays in a particular way, that portrayal is bias on its face.) 

As Eric Alterman has demonstrated in his book “What Liberal Media?” conservative think thanks, which are responsible for much newspaper opinion content, ("Much? How much is "much?" Is "much" enough to establish a pervasive conservative media bias? But really, opinion content is by its very nature someone's perspective. An opinion is synonymous with bias, and properly so. The complaints of bias apply to sources that ought not be biased. Does not the author understand this?) 

are far better funded than their liberal counterparts. (I sincerely doubt this, but who can argue with and unsourced assertion?) Anyone who thinks the interests of corporate America are muted in our media needs a reality check. 

(No one has asserted that corporate voices are mute in media. Those corporations give to liberal causes and political candidates quite profusely. It is a caricature of corporations to assume they're conservative.)

Meanwhile, we almost never hear about conservative media bias. It’s very real.

Last week came news of a pack of conservative pundits, led by Joshua Trevino and including writers for Commentary magazine and the Red State blog, who took nearly $400,000 to advocate on behalf of the government of Malaysia. (Trevino has never been a journalist. He's always been an opinion maker and shaper, and did some things of a questionable nature. His activities are certainly worthy of scrutiny. What this has to do with conservative bias, howerver, is anyone's guess.)  

Keep this in mind next time any of these foreign government water-carriers say liberals are insufficiently patriotic. (At least in the case of the conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, the sources for the payola he took during George W. Bush’s presidency to write favorable columns about national education policy were domestic.)

And how about the cozy relationship between Fox News Channel and top Republican presidential contenders? In recent years, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum have all been on Fox’s revolving-door payroll. There’s nothing illegal or even unethical about this, but it reeks of network-party incest. (This seems like a strange accusation, given that Fox also has frequent appearances by Juan Williams, Mark Lamont Hill, Geraldo Rivera, Al Sharpton, Barney Frank, Anthony Weiner, and a long long list of other leftist guests on the various opinion and news shows. But of course, the author fails to notice the partisans regularly employed by the networks, even placing them in "news" shows as anchors. People like George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Mika Brzezinski, Dylan Ratigan, Christiane Amanpour, Don Lemon, Piers Morgan, Soledad O'Brien, Keith Olbermann.) 

Syndicated conservative columnists dominate op-ed pages nationwide. A few years ago, Media Matters for America conducted a survey of American daily papers. MMFA found that 60 percent of papers ran more conservative columnists than liberal columnists and 20 percent ran more liberals than conservatives, with the remaining 20 percent split. (MMFA is a far left organization. I sincerely doubt they surveyed the content of opinion columns with any sense of balance at all. But even if they did, opinion writers are expected to express an opinion. Bias is a problem when it appears in places it should not. Does the author have any examples of conservative bias where it should not be, like a news story? One example will do.)

Question: If the U.S. media are so bad, what sort of alternative might conservatives prefer?

I presume no self-respecting, First Amendment-revering American of any ideological stripe wants a state-run or state-censored media like those I’ve seen up close in China, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. If conservative
fury with National Public Radio is any indication, a state-funded but independent media like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or the British Broadcasting Corporation would be nearly as unacceptable.

The truth is that the ideal media structure for conservatives is one in which large, profit-oriented and politically powerful corporations own the broadcast and cable television networks, the major newspapers (The largest newspapers are left-leaning outlets like the NY Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, etc.) 

(The Wall Street Journal boasts the nation’s largest circulation) (It's reporting leans left and its opinion page leans right) 

and newspaper chains, and broadcast radio. (Which plainly reveals its opinion status and political proclivities.) 

And that’s exactly what we have in America. (As we have noted above, corporations are not automatically conservative, and even if they were, we still have to judge the content of their news broadcasts. The author has yet to do this, either for conservative bias or liberal bias.)

Yet the “liberal media bias” complaint persists. Conspiracy-minded conservatives should ask themselves: If liberals really owned and ran the media, why isn’t “conservative media bias” the more common term in national politics? (Exactly. The author has swerved into the truth unawares. His template has failed him, but he doesn't know why. "Conservative media bias" isn't the more common term because it rarely happens. The news (that is, fact-based reporting), is the correct place for us to focus on for hints of bias. The author hasn't even touched on this. 

As a liberal he doesn't even recognize bias because the bias he hears lines up with his world-view. That's what irritates leftists about Fox. It isn't because it's hopelessly far-right, because it objectively isn't. It's because Fox News is not as far left as most of the major media, so their reporting jangles on the nerves of leftists as it violates their world-view.)

Thomas F. Schaller teaches political science at the University of Maryland — Baltimore County. Readers may send him email at schaller67@gmail.com .