• by Daniel Frankel , October 2, 2008

C might be for cookie, but B is for bias

Few have ever accused the media of slanting conservative. Fewer still have ever suspected Sesame Street as a breeding ground for tiny neocons, though some family-values watchdogs have accused Bert and Ernie of threatening the American way of life.

But consider the brief reign of Kenneth Tomlinson. Tomlinson served a controversial two-year term as chairman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, during which time the Bush political appointee embarked on an aggressive quest to hire employees with a "conservative viewpoint," an investigator said, and "balance" the pubcaster's programming. Tomlinson even commissioned a $10,000 study intended to prove Bill Moyer's PBS show tilted left, and discussed with Karl Rove the idea of creating a conservative talk show. (Tomlinson resigned in 2005 under scandal, accused of breaking federal rules by using "political tests" in hiring decisions and using public money for private endeavors, but not before W became Sesame Street's "Letter of the Day" on the morning following Bush's second-term victory.)

The goal for journalists, to be "fair and balanced," does not hold for all media, of course, and there is some evidence that Americans seem to respond well, in fact, to a little bias - when they know where it's coming from. The Daily Show had its best ratings of its six-year run the week of Sept. 22 (when Wall Street imploded and banks began to swallow one another whole like the Donner party at a buffet table).

But what about bias in the search for bias?

"Stephanopoulos Corrects McCain but Last Week Defended Obama," read a September link on the Media Research Center's home page.

If you scrolled down, past a link to a video titled "Olbermann Has Angry Breakdown Over 9/11 Video Tribute," but just above the "Special Report: "Obama's Margin of Victory: the Media," you got to a story about a poll: "By 10-1 Public Says Reporters 'Trying to Hurt Palin.'"

Regardless of how exaggerated or unjustified that headline, the MRC - which identifies itself as "America's Media Watchdog" - should probably take some credit for the claim.

Established 21 years ago by L. Brent Bozell iii, the robustly monikered former chair of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, "to bring balance and responsibility to the news media," the MRC has grown into a significant media organization in its own right. And its message of mistrust seems to have taken hold.

Bozell also founded the Parents Television Council, which these days routinely takes shows like Gossip Girl to task with hyperbolic warnings about sexual content and has achieved high levels of annoyance and notoriety among those working in the news media. The MRC's key agenda throughout the 1990s remained "documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias," and publishing newsletters, videos and books, including the Bozell-penned And That's the Way It Isn't: A Reference Guide to Media Bias.

In the early part of the decade, the organization moved out of the fringe, increasing its profile and activities, publishing even more of Bozell's books and launching a number of "rapid response" blogs. TimesWatch, for example, continually lambasted The New York Times, even with Judith Miller on the Grey Lady's payroll, the GOP controlling both houses of Congress and the White House, and Fox News and the Drudge Report emerging as powerful and not-so-liberally-biased media forces.

Meanwhile, other conservative operatives joined the fight, each convinced that a wide swath of competing news outlets - collectively employing tens of thousands of people, controlled mostly by corporate interests, serving myriad consumer bases and increasingly fixated on mere economic survival - were looking for ways to screw Republicans.

Even established media denizens like the conservative Weekly Standard began counting and qualifying headlines in search of bias, declaring in a 2004 story, "The argument over whether the national press is dominated by liberals is over." That article cited a litany of statistical analyses, including a study concluding that stories about that year's Democratic presidential candidates were 70 percent "positive," while those about President George W. Bush - who was presiding over a rapidly degenerating war in Iraq at the time - were 60 percent "negative."

These days, even for small-time conservative media critics, the devil is in the data, no matter its validity. Perhaps unaware that a determination of liberal media bias had been finalized four years prior by the Standard, economist John Lott conducted his own study for the trade publication Multihousing Professional last spring. In a column headlined "The Recession Is a Media Myth," Lott used his own method of statistical analysis to show the media was creating the misperception of a dour economy.

"A Nexis search of news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 [when Bill Clinton was president] using the keywords 'economy recession U.S.' produces 1,388 [stories]," Lott noted. "By contrast, the same search over just the last month [with George W. Bush in office] finds 3,166." Thus, the economic downturn is a media myth? By now we all know how accurate that claim is.

Of course, boiling down the conscious and unconscious inclinations of a large group of information workers to known quantities always inflates tires worth kicking.

Plying Lott's rigorous methodology, try running a Nexis search of one of baseball's best regular-season teams last season, the Tampa Bay Rays, along with the word "win"; then run the same search with one of the game's worst squads, the Seattle Mariners. The results could lead one to conclude that baseball writers are biased in favor of Tampa Bay, but the addition of some late relief and a little power in the middle of the lineup for the Mariners might have led to "objectivity" pretty fast.

Still, regardless of any squishiness of these quantifiable claims of bias, American conservatives - and even those who don't identify themselves as such - no longer merely suspect large news-media institutions like The New York Times, Washington Post and MSNBC of tilting left. They now presume it.

A poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports during the gop convention, for example, determined that 51 percent of American voters thought news reporters were out to "hurt" Sarah Palin through coverage of her selection as John McCain's running mate. Along with that presumption has come backlash - and backlashes to backlashes.

Hand in hand with the growing national assumption that most of the news media tilts left has come the emergence of a new class of media - Web sites like the conservative-funded Newsmax, for example - that require no Lexis-Nexis search to determine which way the wind blows.

Meanwhile, progressives are having their own trust issues with the media these days; notably, they accused Time magazine of conservative pandering back in April 2005 for putting Ann Coulter on its cover. (Though nobody accused the editors of being Nazis when they put Hitler on the cover of the Jan. 2, 1939 "Man of the Year" issue.)

And besides establishing their own kind of affirmative reaction to what they see as conservative bias - such as the conspicuous launch of Air America Radio in 2004 - progressive news-business watchdogs have also joined the fray, including Media Matters for America, which scours TV, print and the Internet looking for "conservative misinformation."

The result of all of this, of course, is nobody trusts anybody very much.

According to a poll jointly conducted last year by Zogby and the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, 83 percent of American voters believe the media is biased in one direction or another.

That might be data worth taking seriously.