http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html?
pagewanted=all
By RICHARD A. POSNER
Published: July 31, 2005
THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and
right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart
bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their
audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In
a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65
percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they
discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79
percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative
stories about a corporation from which it received substantial
advertising revenues.
The industry's critics agree that the function of the news is to inform
people about social, political, cultural, ethical and economic issues so
that they can vote and otherwise express themselves as responsible
citizens. They agree on the related point that journalism is a
profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and
their employers must not allow profit considerations to dominate, but
must acknowledge an ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly,
without bias, reserving the expression of political preferences for the
editorial page and its radio and television counterparts. The critics
further agree, as they must, that 30 years ago news reporting was
dominated by newspapers and by television network news and that the
audiences for these media have declined with the rise of competing
sources, notably cable television and the Web.
The audience decline is potentially fatal for newspapers. Not only has
their daily readership dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to
37.5 percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20-to-49-year-
old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages will remain, much more
comfortable with electronic media in general and the Web in particular
than the current elderly are.
At this point the diagnosis splits along political lines. Liberals,
including most journalists (because most journalists are liberals),
believe that the decline of the formerly dominant ''mainstream'' media
has caused a deterioration in quality. They attribute this decline to
the rise of irresponsible journalism on the right, typified by the Fox
News Channel (the most-watched cable television news channel), Rush
Limbaugh's radio talk show and right-wing blogs by Matt Drudge and
others. But they do not spare the mainstream media, which, they contend,
provide in the name of balance an echo chamber for the right. To these
critics, the deterioration of journalism is exemplified by the attack of
the ''Swift boat'' Vietnam veterans on Senator John Kerry during the
2004 election campaign. The critics describe the attack as consisting of
lies propagated by the new right-wing media and reported as news by
mainstream media made supine by anxiety over their declining fortunes.
Critics on the right applaud the rise of the conservative media as a
long-overdue corrective to the liberal bias of the mainstream media,
which, according to Jim A. Kuypers, the author of ''Press Bias and
Politics,'' are ''a partisan collective which both consciously and
unconsciously attempts to persuade the public to accept its
interpretation of the world as true.'' Fourteen percent of Americans
describe themselves as liberals, and 26 percent as conservatives. The
corresponding figures for journalists are 56 percent and 18 percent.
This means that of all journalists who consider themselves either
liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider themselves liberal,
compared with only 35 percent of the public that has a stated political
position.
So politically one-sided are the mainstream media, the right complains
(while sliding over the fact that the owners and executives, as distinct
from the working journalists, tend to be far less liberal), that not
only do they slant the news in a liberal direction; they will stop at
nothing to defeat conservative politicians and causes. The right points
to the ''60 Minutes II'' broadcast in which Dan Rather paraded what were
probably forged documents concerning George W. Bush's National Guard
service, and to Newsweek's erroneous report, based on a single anonymous
source, that an American interrogator had flushed a copy of the Koran
down the toilet (a physical impossibility, one would have thought).
Strip these critiques of their indignation, treat them as descriptions
rather than as denunciations, and one sees that they are consistent with
one another and basically correct. The mainstream media are
predominantly liberal - in fact, more liberal than they used to be. But
not because the politics of journalists have changed. Rather, because
the rise of new media, itself mainly an economic rather than a political
phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the already liberal media
farther left...
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
Political correctness is a form of moral and emotional blackmail
whereby if you call a spade a spade you must apologize to the spade.
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