Why Conservatives Loathe The MSM So Much

22 Feb, 2005 by John Hawkins

Print this article Font size -16+

You know what really chafes conservatives about the mainstream media? It’s not just that the MSM is overwhelmingly staffed with liberals who let their hostility to conservatism leak into their reporting, it’s that they won’t ADMIT THAT THEY’RE LIBERALS. The same liberal journalists who hate FoxNews with a passion because it leans to the right, will claim to be totally unbiased with their next breath.

Want an example of what I’m talking about? Read what Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times has to say about blogs,

“Keller also sees “blogging,” or online writing that blurs news and commentary, as a mixed blessing. While he celebrated the blogger’s ability to uncover breaking news, he noted that a blog’s inherent bias might be detrimental to the reader. “A blog is still a view of the world through a pinhole,” he said, noting that it can sometimes fall as low as being a “one man circle jerk.”

“There is a pressure to feel well informed without ever confronting an opinion that confronts your prejudices,” he said of blog readers.”

You know how I’m going to respond to that? By posting this excerpt from my interview with media critic Bernard Goldberg…

Bernard Goldberg: But, I think that Jayson Blair took a lot of time and attention away from a much more important subject. What the media and the New York Times should have been paying more attention to is that they let their ideology slip off of the editorial pages and into their news pages way too often. You could read the sports pages of the New York Times and you get ideology shoved down your throat all the time. This Augusta story, right?

John Hawkins: Oh, that was so annoying…

Bernard Goldberg: They raised that to the level of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Then you read a movie review as I did week or so ago, the movie has nothing to do with politics, and the movie reviewer is taking cheap shots at the Fox News channel. So they’re giving us ideology there. Then you will think I’m making this up, they run a piece about food in the magazine section. Now let me read this to you, it’s a short thing. Johnathan Reynolds is the writer. He talked about his trip to Norway to learn how to prepare scallops and other fish. But in the midst of this piece, he’s talking about monkfish, and he says, “it sits on the bottom of the ocean, opens its Godzilla jaws and waits for poor unsuspecting fishies to swim right into it, not unlike the latest recipients of W’s capital-gains cuts.”

John Hawkins: (Groan)

Bernard Goldberg: Now this is the problem at the New York Times, not Jayson Blair. You get ideology on page 1, you get ideology on the sports page, you get ideology in the movie reviews, and you get ideology in a story about monkfish! It’s ridiculous!

Here’s more from Daniel Okrent, the former public editor of the New York Times…

“Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? OF course it is.

The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left — and there are plenty — generally confine their complaints to the paper’s coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.

I’ll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

But if you’re examining the paper’s coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.”

Listening to the executive editor of the New York Times complain about how blogs look at the world “through a pinhole” and don’t make their readers confront their prejudices would be like listening to Hillary Clinton complain about women who get ahead because of the men they marry: it’s a joke.

Maybe Bill Keller and the rest of the staff at the New York Times will see that one day when they start confronting their prejudices.