Media Bashing Gets Serious (III)

The UK's the source for the two previous posts about the media falling short. The BBC’s documented bias is big news, because the BBC is a public corporation, and thus under real pressure to report the news straight. Ironically, the BBC’s left-leaning, politically-correct bias hasn’t helped Labour's Tony Blair, for the BBC is part of the media pack that has excoriated him for being “Bush’s Poodle” in Iraq.

Our media, though benefiting hugely from the U.S. constitution’s absolute guarantee of a free press, is largely independent of government subsidies. Press freedom includes the freedom to lean heavily to one side in national politics. Bill Dedman, an investigative reporter for MSNBC, has looked up the campaign contributions of 143 journalists. To no one’s surprise, I suspect, 127 gave to Democrats. That’s 89%. It’s nearly the same percentage of Washington journalists (91%) who said in an informal 1992 poll they had voted for Clinton for president.

This is a big story, even though it’s “dog bites man.” The media are very powerful, as Blair has said, and they comment on the news, don’t just report facts. Yet they pose as impartial and get away with it, because our system has no way of forcing journalists to be unbiased. Unlike the BBC, which can force changes when bias appears.

Of course, a small share of U.S. media is—like the BBC—government financed: PBS and NPR. Dedman says CNN’s Guy Raz, who now covers the Pentagon for NPR, gave $500 to Kerry the same month he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. After noting that both CNN and NPR forbid political activity, Dedman quotes Raz’s e-mail response: "I covered international news and European Union stories. I did not cover U.S. news or politics." When Dedman then asked how one could define U.S. news so it excludes the U.S. war in Iraq, Raz made no further reply.

PBS’s bias has shown in its refusal to air the segment of “America at a Crossroads” it paid Frank Gaffney and his partner $675,000 in taxpayer money to produce. Gaffney is a former Reagan administration official. PBS asked Gaffney’s more non-political partner about Gaffney, saying to the partner, “Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?” Imagine the Democratic-fueled firestorm that would have erupted had a Bush administration official asked any PBS producer such a question! What’s especially outrageous about the $20 million “America at a Crossroads” series’ refusal to air the Gaffney segment is that the series on Islam today was seeking a spectrum of views.

Well, part of a spectrum, anyway.