MSM Has NO Integrity – from an Insider

One of many maddening problems that NQ readers and writers have long puzzled over (and cursed, and railed against) is the seemingly intractable media bias in favor of Barack Obama. Beginning with the smear tactics and misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton in the primaries, the media has intentionally helped Obama every step of the way.

Yes, I said “Intentionally.” How do I know? Are you kidding? What else could possibly explain all the hate directed at first Hillary, then McCain and now Palin? What else could possibly explain the media’s unwillingness to conduct even a cursory investigation of Obama’s background? While Obama’s Columbia years are still a mystery, we know all about McCain’s grades at the Naval Academy (and, yes ‘bots, he graduated from a real tough “college”) and about Palin’s college transfers.

How could Cindy McCain’s past drug use (admitted, explained and atoned for so many years ago) possibly be pertinent while Obama’s admitted drug use (of ILLEGAL drugs) is glossed over completely?

How could McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal years ago — for which he stood before an ethics committee and which was thoroughly investigated — be comparable to the decades-long, intense political and personal relationships of Barack Obama with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko and Father Michael Pfleger, while those rate only a metaphorical roll of the eyes from the media?

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A useful philosophical and practical application here is the idea stated as “Occam’s Razor.” Basically, this means that all things being equal, the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is usually the best.

Today, a writer at ABCNews has an explanation for why the media is so biased this year. He begins with a discussion of the ethics of journalism, or what is supposed to happen when one writes an article. Then he describes some situations he has seen in the past, and describes how journalists handled them.

He says journalists learn how to shade a story with the choice of certain verbs and adjectives. But they learn this in order to train their eyes to recognize the technique, not to practice it, even inadvertently. He also laments the loss of a commitment to journalistic objectivity. I quote:

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty — especially in ourselves.

—————–

. . . I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

Apparently, what took this guy right off the cliff was a CNN story a few years back. I quote:

But what really shattered my faith — and I know the day and place where it happened — was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

And then we come to this year’s Presidential election.

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

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Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far — such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain’s daughter’s MySpace friends — can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

He goes on to say the media scraped bottom with “Joe the Plumber.” However, the writer notes that since the campaign has some time to go, the bottom may not be here yet.

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

OK, nothing new here. But then the author goes on to say reporters themselves are not the problem. Reporters are after stories and would pursue anything looking like a story. The problem, says the author, are the editors.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

————

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country. . .

Interesting. Could it really be this simple? Could the media bias be completely explained by editorial self-interest? Of course, self-interest is not a noble reason to pimp one’s paper, tv show or column for a particular candidate. But if you can cloak that self-interest in some higher purpose, such as, say, opposing racism, hope or change, then you are nearly unassailable, able to pursue your bias while maintaining the appearance of holiness. And you won’t even have to explain yourself if you’re proven wrong later since you were looking for a “higher good,” even if that “higher good” is nothing more than naked political bias.

Could it really be that simple? Editors and columnists who are fighting the changes in journalism seen in the decline of print news and even in television news regularly deride the “unprofessional” bloggers, while using their bully pulpits to call out other people as racists and unprofessional thinkers. These people believe their ability to “analyze” and “explain” the news to us little people is under attack by the dirty masses of the uneducated and the unthinking.

They are right. They are under attack, but more by progress in communications technology than directly by bloggers. Many people still watch tv news, but that has shifted from network to cable and is dropping off there as well. Many people use the Internet to get their news and only occasionally tune in in “real time.” So, tv has even more screeching mouth pundits than real news shows anymore.

It’s a downward spiral. The more they try to amp up viewers or readers, the more people change the channel and / or cancel the subscription. While many people were turned off by Fox during the Bush administration, equal numbers or more are likely to be turned off by MSNBC now. And as an aside, are all those pretty talking heads on the cable news channels all wonderful journalists? Or are they attractive talking heads who are good at reading the teleprompter? What are the journalistic standards these days anyway?

You know, it really doesn’t matter though. Many people just don’t trust “news outlets” anymore. Count me in here. I can count on one hand the national “journalists” I think worth listening to. Check that. I only need two fingers.

I think this writer has an interesting point. If you apply Occam’s Razor and think the simplest explanation makes the most sense, then this journalist’s reasoning deserves some real attention.

Over at partizane.com, newhampster also covered this story.

Nine days.  Nines days and not a single ad re-introducing the dishonorable Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Nine days and no 527s asking why the anthem was canceled in my home town.

Nine days and lo and behold some in the media can’t keep quiet anymore.  They are beginning to ask why their brethren “journalists” have forgotten what journalism is about.  My question to the now honorable Michael Malone is, “where have you been the last 2 years?”.  “What makes you wait until a week before election to come out and call out your fellows?”

Good point. Also perceptive was a commenter on that site who said:

Submitted by creeper on Sun, 10/26/2008 – 12:45.
Editors get their marching orders from publishers and owners.  Malone didn’t even mention them, nor the effect of money on this election coverage.  This article only got halfway there.

You know, I think many dissertations will be written in the next 20 years about the failure and/or the mutation of the “4th estate” into something less than objective journalism. I think this election will be seen as the moment when the MSM jumped the shark and proved it deserves neither our trust nor our interest. It will be so obvious people will wonder why it took us so long to realize our “journalists” were really salesmen pimping themselves out for pundit shows and book contracts.

I’m just sorry that the explanation for media bias is so banal. Self-interest, after all, isn’t a very sexy explanation, but it’s a profoundly human one. I think that explanation passes Occam’s Razor.

Lastly, the media have not been into self reflection very much, except as a way to “prove” how right they are and wrong their critics are. The reaction to the article I cite at length hear will surely ruffle a few feathers. A well-regarded member of the clan is calling them out, however late in the game. Will he be listened to or pilloried?

I’m guessing he will be ignored in the orgy of self-congratulation to come when the MSM feels it has both called the election correctly and had its collective wisdom about who should be elected vindicated. Just don’t look for a real discussion of that “wisdom.”

Oh, and don’t forget. Although offering a useful scenario of how and why the MSM is so in the tank for Obama, the journalist author is still pointing the finger at – wait for it – someone else.