The weekend brought a startling omission from the venerable, politely left-wing magazine The New Yorker, courtesy of staff writer Jay Caspian Kang: “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” (New Yorker style apparently treats the plural word “media” as singular.) Kang’s answer: Pretty biased toward Democrats, if not the far-left.
His question was hooked to Gallup’s annual poll, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media," a trust which has declined from over 70 percent in 1976 to 31 percent today.
You don’t need a Gallup poll to tell that the public’s trust in the mass media -- which for these purposes we can define as the major broadcast and cable networks, newspapers, and a handful of high-profile magazines -- has fallen, and, although the reasons for this decline aren’t as immediately clear as they might seem, the fallout from decades of growing suspicion and contempt toward the press litters the political discourse. Much of the criticism aimed at the media is both fair and accurate, and, even if I don’t believe the scale of the harms to be as large as some say, I do think the attacks carry added significance in an election year….
Kang offered up a hypothetical question, then answered it:
Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.
Kang’s “reply” references former NPR editor Uri Berliner, who revealed his company's intolerant brand of tax-funded leftism:
The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals. Conservative outlets are not shy about labelling themselves as such, even if only through a wink and a nod. At prestige outlets--many of which do don the armor of impartiality--the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine. This past April, a former editor at NPR named Uri Berliner published an article, in the Free Press, about how a decade of cultural shifts inside the company had ushered in the reign of an identity-based progressive politics that was anathema to the journalistic process.
While Kang rejected Berliner’s belief that the existence of newsroom identity groups explains the coverage bias, he offered this devastating detail:
….I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.
….
So let’s start there: the people who make up the prestige press are overwhelmingly liberals who would satisfy most definitions of the “coastal élite.” But does that actually translate into biased coverage? As [New York Times publisher A.G.] Sulzberger intimated, it’s difficult to believe that a press corps mostly made up of one type of person who votes one type of way would not be influenced by both their prior beliefs and their gaps in knowledge. And, indeed, the Times--who bears the brunt of media criticism across all political spectrums--has not endorsed a Republican for President since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, nor do they have a columnist or editorial writer who openly supports Trump. The situation is largely the same at the big network-news shows and most newspapers. So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news.
But then Kang attacked a strawman.
The question, then, is whether or not this bias constitutes something bordering on a conspiracy where people within newsrooms and production rooms are actively trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The answer is still no. The American press is not some finely tuned machine but, rather, a chaotic institution in decline made up of individuals from similar backgrounds who hold similar political beliefs. If one must speak broadly about them, they tend to be much more hostile to what they see as the far left than they are to the moderate right….
But as CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg famously wrote in 1996 while criticizing his own network, there’s no need for a conspiracy: "No, we don't sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we're going to slant the news. We don't have to. It comes naturally to most reporters."
The far-left Green Party did start getting more hostile coverage when it started taking votes away from Democrats, but the sympathetic coverage of the pro-Hamas movement on college campuses, and its soft-pedaling of the evils of Communism, cuts against Kang’s theory of an all-encompassing media hostility toward the far left.
Kang underlined his core belief: "I believe that mainstream coverage inevitably tilts toward favoring mainstream Democratic candidates such as Harris…."
