The Conservative Bias of Liberal Media

 Dan Pfeiffer, a long-time Democratic political player has provided an analysis of how the Democrats usually fail in matching the Republican’s messaging machine in his book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America.  He provides a number of interesting insights that merit discussion.  Here we will examine his claim that the proclaimed liberal bias that supposedly dominates major press entities is a myth.  He argues that the way the press operates today produces instead a conservative bias in coverage.

The notion of a liberal bias in news coverage has been easy to sell.  Reporters of news at a competent organization require background knowledge in a number of areas, thus demanding significant formal education.  They must be able to use words wisely, forming them into coherent sentences.  The sentences must be organized into an article that conveys information accurately and efficiently.  These are the hallmarks of an “elite liberal” who is most likely Democratic leaning in their personal life.  Educational attainment is a strong marker for political leanings.  There may have been a time when their actually was such a bias in reporting, but any such period is long past.  In Pfeiffer’s view, political coverage is today dominated by a conservative disinformation machine that has no counter from the Left or from national media.

“The entire right-wing disinformation apparatus was built on a Big Lie told many years ago that persists to this day.”

“The idea that media is biased against conservatives is the justification for the right-wing disinformation machine.  The Federalist, Breitbart, and Sean Hannity are necessary, the thinking goes, to push back against the overwhelmingly liberal bias of the mainstream media.  Almost as a condition of membership into the party, Republican politicians are required to blame their problems on ‘liberal bias.’  Struggling in the polls?  Blame liberal bias.  Failed to repeal Obamacare?  Blame liberal Bias.”

Pfeiffer concedes that while incorrect, the claims of bias have been very effective.

“The Right hammers this point home so relentlessly that everyone in politics believes it to be true.  Reporters, editors, and publishers are so convinced of their own bias that they swerve out of their lane to adjust for it.  Democrats are convinced that those in the media are our friends and teammates, and we are in shock every time a media outlet disappoints us.  And Republican voters are so convinced of the bias that they might reflexively dismiss a New York Times article claiming that the sky is blue and the grass is green.”

There is a fundamental reason why no party should depend on mainstream media as an ally.

“The mainstream media’s dominant bias is not ideological, it’s attitudinal.  The media crave conflict over all else; they love a crisis.  There’s an old saying: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’  This refers to the tendency of local television news to prioritize crime and traffic accidents over all other topics.  In political news, clashes, showdowns, and circular firing squads get all the attention.  After all, a functioning government is not sexy.”

“Why might this dynamic benefit the Right?  Well, with a small handful of exceptions over the years, the major conflict in politics comes down to this: Democrats are trying to make government work, and Republicans are using whatever power they have to break it.  Coverage that Disproportionately focuses on the things that are broken versus the things that work benefits the antigovernment party. 

The most significant result of the Republican assault on the “biased” mainstream media is that they are so afraid of being accused of bias that they actually go easier on Republican politicians than Democratic ones.  The appropriate comparison for Pfeiffer was the treatment the press gave Donald Trump in 2020 when the world was going to hell and the treatment Biden received in 2021 when the world was not going to hell.

“…Dana Milbank of the Washington Post found some actual data demonstrating how badly the media has swerved out of its lane to appease its right-wing critics.  Milbank asked an artificial intelligence company to analyze two hundred thousand articles and compare President Biden’s coverage in 2021 with Donald trump’s coverage in 2020…Surely his coverage was worse than Biden’s.”

“It was not.  As Milbank wrote:

In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a super spreader event in the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the ‘big lie,’ the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.

And yet, Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today.”

This is not the first demonstration of how the mainstream press coddles Republicans and torments Democrats.  Paul Starr produced an article for the New York Review of Books providing details on press performance during 2016 election campaign.  The article, Fallf rom Grace, reviewed the book Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts.

A conclusion presented was that balance and fairness were two different things.  Although most of the media had good intentions, their interest in “fairness” led them to foolishly highlight many of the outrageous claims emerging from the far-right.

“In 2016, Benkler and his colleagues argue, the right was able to ‘harness’ the press to its cause because of journalists’ preoccupation with ‘balance’ and eagerness for scoops. They note that the press had an institutional problem: How would it maintain balance if reporters did hard-hitting stories about Trump? Borrowing from a study by Thomas E. Patterson, they conclude that the solution was to run equally hard-hitting stories about Hillary Clinton. Journalists ‘performed’ neutrality with harshly negative coverage of both candidates.”

The media countered many articles about real Trump misbehaviors with even more articles about “alleged” Clinton misbehaviors.  The net result was that Hillary Clinton was accorded more negative coverage than Donald Trump

“In fact, according to Patterson’s analysis, negative coverage of Clinton outpaced positive coverage 62 percent to 38 percent, while coverage of Trump was 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive.”

So much for “liberal bias” in mainstream media.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.