APPARENT MEDIA BIAS HAS EASY EXPLANATION
With the election two
months away, we’re bound to hear concerns of media bias. Let me save everyone the trouble: The media are biased, tilted comfortably left of
center. In other news,
moon implicated in tides.
Lichter, Lichter and
Rothman’s 1981 book “The Media Elite” showed how journalist self-reported
voting patterns were far more Democratic and their political views more liberal
than the population at large. The Los
Angeles Times survey of 1985 reported similar results. More contemporary studies from the
I don’t think that the
liberalism of journalists affects the accuracy of reportage. Journalists and the newspapers that employ
them are deeply committed to factual accuracy in what they write and
print. But the same things that attract
people to pick journalism as a career may be the same things that attract
people to liberalism. There is something
about mainstream journalism that means conservatives and libertarians are going
to have a rough go of it.
Consider how journalists
impact society. That impact is primarily
through the ability to tell a compelling story, and liberalism is the politics
of compelling stories. When something
has concentrated costs and diffuse benefits, the most gripping stories focus on
the costs. When the roles are reversed,
they focus on the benefits. Either way,
liberalism wins.
Consider, for example,
handgun ownership. When a deranged
psychopath goes on a rampage, the tragic human cost makes the best story. No editor will ever send a reporter out on
assignment to write about the robberies, muggings and rapes that never happened
because citizens were armed. The
benefits are too diffuse. If you were a
city reporter and had to interview the relatives of yet another victim of
handgun violence, how could you not support gun control? You’d have to be made of stone.
Or take vouchers, another
conservative hot-button issue. Families,
if given the opportunity, will spend educational vouchers in a variety of
ways. We cannot predict where the money
will go, so the benefits are diffuse.
The costs, however, are quite visible: the local public school will no longer get tax
money. The easiest story to write will
focus on that, because those are the immediately visible costs.
Many years ago, the New
York Times magazine ran a story about a pilot voucher program, with selection
determined by lottery. They printed
side-by-side photos of two mothers of school-age children, one overjoyed to be
selected and another heartbroken because she was not. The story was all about inequity, because the
human cost of inequity as captured in that picture was more visceral and more
compelling than any as-yet-to-be-determined benefits.
The same is true with tax
cuts and spending cuts. We have no way
of knowing how people will spend any tax savings, so while you might interview
a policy wonk and get a sentence or two for “balance”, there’s no real story there. But when spending cuts on any program are
proposed, there is always an opportunity to interview the single mother who
receives social benefit X or the lobbying group for target benefit Y. They’ll be more than happy to tell you how
much they’ll be hurt.
In fact, you can take any political
issue. If the benefits are concentrated
and the costs are diffuse, or vice versa, I’ll give you odds that the most
compelling story will focus on whichever is most concentrated. That story will support the liberal view of
the world.
Ultimately, journalism is
a business like any other. The media
want to write stories you want to read, produce TV shows you want to watch, and
make films you want to go see. When
people genuinely want to watch films about how to make health care cheaper and
better, tune in TV shows about heroes who create wealth, and read daily factual
stories about the diffuse but real benefits of individual freedom and
responsibility, liberal media bias will disappear.
Can such stories be
written, or is the deck stacked in favor of liberals? Are the things that make you a compelling
writer more likely to make you a liberal?
Or is it just that society’s best writers, visual artists, and
storytellers join liberal institutions because things have always been that
way? The future of freedom in