Lie #7 - The News Media is Objective, Fair, Balanced—
and Always Has Been
“Look Bernie [Bernard Goldberg], of course there’s a liberal bias in the news, All the networks tilt left.” —Andrew Heyward, Executive Producer, CBS News, In 1993, Quoted in Bernard Goldberg, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How The Media Distort the News
Many adult Americans grew up in the age of Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, or even Edward R. Murrow, all of whom were viewed as objective or “fair,” but none of whom really were. However, the difference between them and the modern television news people is that they, at least, were good actors, and concealed their true partisan colors. Certainly, their own views helped shape what was covered, and in the case of Murrow, his famous slime attack against Joseph McCarthy was overt, as was Cronkite’s disgust with the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, Americans, by large, trusted news organizations to provide reasonably accurate, and generally honest, reports of the day’s events.
In fact, this approach to fact-based news only dated back to the American Civil War. Prior to that time, all news was partisan or motivated solely by the goal of electing a certain party’s candidates. It might come as a shock, but almost none of the antebellum papers were interested in making money: there were only a handful of newspapers that depended on circulation to stay alive, such as James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald or Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. These were by far the exceptions.
From the time of the Revolution until the 1820s, American papers (always with some exceptions) tended to be focused heavily on local news, and were somewhat impartial. Certainly some papers were “Jeffersonian” and others were “Federalists” and their rhetoric could get heated. Parties themselves, however, did not directly fund or control most papers.
That changed drastically when Martin Van Buren conceived of a new political party based on patronage, the Jacksonians or Jacksonians Democrats (later just Democrats). He knew that getting out the vote was the key to victory at the polls. A number of structural political reforms made this possible—eliminating property requirements for voters, national conventions for candidates, the demise of “King Caucus” (the practice before Andrew Jackson’s time of having all candidates selected be small groups of influential citizens in the caucus) —but in the end, propaganda in its purest form was needed. Van Buren intended to supply it. Jacksonians bought newspapers, installed their own men as editors, and the papers became no more than “propaganda agencies” as one historian labeled them. No editor was more loyal to the Democratic cause than Duff Green, with his United States Telegraph. Green’s Telegraph flatly condemned neutrality as an absence of principles, and overall, editors increasingly inserted their points of view into papers. Green obediently repaid his political masters with pro-Jackson editorials, and obligingly turned out a special extra paper during the 1828 election with a circulation or forty thousand.
The Civil War brought radical change. People wanted to know if their sons, brothers, and fathers were fighting, and if they won or lost, and, most important, if they had been killed. Papers published casualty lists, and within the four-year course of the war, most major papers adopted the “inverted pyramid” style of reporting, in which the most important facts (and only facts) were presented first and the least important last. Virtually overnight, editors abandoned the partisan approach to papers and adopted the objective, fact based approach. “Facts; facts; nothing but facts,” said one editor. “So many peas at so much a peak; so much molasses at so much a quart.” While the war was the single greatest factor affecting the transformation of the press, business demands played a role. Increasingly papers relied less on party subsidies and had to survive on their own circulations — and that, in turn, brought an unwillingness to alienate up to half the consumers who might identify with the opposing political party. Comments by the editors starkly contrasted with the sentiments offered by Duff Green and other partisan editors. Lawrence Gobright, the AP’s Washington agent, concluded, “My business is merely to communicate facts. My instructions do not allow me to make any comments upon the facts which I communicate. . . . My dispatches are merely dry matters of facts and details. The share of objective or “nonbiased” papers in circulation rose to more than 66 percent by 1900, while stories labeled by journalism researchers as “biased” declined especially sharply after 1872.
Modern historians and journalists have sneered at the attempt at objectivity, calling the reporters little more than “notetakers,” but in fact the papers began to slowly change during the New Deal era. Franklin D. Roosevelt, detested by many editors, was fawned over by reporters, who helped him revise his numerous lies about a “ personal friend” in a specific situation (the friend, and the situation, always changed). As Burton Folsom points out, the press overwhelmingly cooperated with FDR. In an effort to portray him as a healthy man, the press never showed him in his wheelchair. Some reporters were even drafted to help design New Deal policy. They also ignored his cheating on Eleanor. He gave reporters and editors private meetings, jobs in his administration, and government loans.
For the most part, the press remained nonpartisan until 1960 when, for a variety of reasons, reporting began to turn rapidly leftward — a shift that occurred well before the Vietnam War. While still maintaining a pretense of objectivity and fairness, reporters, editors, and television news anchors began to steadily slant the news. They repeatedly proclaimed their objectivity, yet survey after survey has shown that the media voted overwhelmingly Democratic in every election since 1970 — and the percentages weren’t even close. A Roper poll, for example, found that 91 percent of journalists surveyed voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. The public saw the press as liberally biased as well: an October 2003 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans said the news media was too liberal, while only 14 percent said it was too conservative.
Although denied by nearly every influential journalist in the mainstream media, the press is biased, badly slanted to the left. This is NOT opinion: this is the result of countless scholarly studies in journalism History and journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, among others. Journalism scholar Jim Kuyper’s, in 2002, surveying several press treatments of volatile public issues, found “there is a demonstrable liberal bias to the mainstream press in America.
To get the rest of this debunked lie along with many more debunked lies check out the book 48 Liberal Lies About American History…