The Gasbag Gap

Liberal media analyist Eric Alterman on a recent Media Matters study of the big three Sunday morning talking head shows. From the Nation courtesy of Eschaton:
Think about it: These shows feel empowered to engage an agenda-setting discussion with a panel of mostly right-wing politicians, followed by a journalists' panel in which conservatives are paired almost exclusively with down-the-middle reporters, rather than a writer or thinker who might credibly represent the liberal side. Every week, a politically neutered George Stephanopoulos seeks the wisdom of the deeply right-wing George Will, and the "neutral" (though personally conservative) Fareed Zakaria, with no balance whatsoever. (Sam Donaldson, a liberal, was previously an exception to this rule, though no liberal I know would have picked him to represent our side.) The guest list for the far more influential Meet the Press tells a similar story. Why, asks the MMA study's author, Paul Waldman, "would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow "balanced" by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)?"

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The news isn't simply a collection of events recorded by reporters and then delivered to readers and viewers for their consumption. Events are contextualized, by both reporters and pundits. That is, the news is as much about constructing narratives as it is about recording events. Years ago, before I started studying the news industry, I remember thinking right after I had seen a state of the union address or a presidential debate, that the TV news people were now going to tell me what it all meant--I was consciously relying on the talking heads to cobble together a piece of storyline that neatly fit into the overall storyline with which I was already familiar. I get the feeling that most Americans who consume news do pretty much the same thing. Obviously, people have their own ideas and opinions, but generally those ideas and opinions rely heavily on the news industry's power to contextualize.

And if you think about it for, say, two seconds, it's completely clear that this power of narrative is wildly subjective: back in 2003, the storyline was that anyone who was serious about foreign policy knew that Iraq had WMD, and all other opinions were either stupid or crazy. Of course, plenty of experts disputed the official US position, but virtually all mainstream American journalistic institutions ignored them--their views didn't fit in with the narrative that "the news" had constructed.

That's why it is extraordinarily important for these talking head shows, as well as newspaper op-ed pages, to have a wide ranging diversity of opinion. Really, if the news truly wants to be true to its holy grail of "objectivity" they ought not to be in the opinion business at all, but, then, it seems to me that the news business has never really been serious about its own stated ethical standards.

At any rate, Alterman has done a nice job these past few years of documenting systemic right-wing bias in mainstream American news, and his reflections on this new study are worth a look. Check it out.

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