The myth of liberal bias in the news media

During the last election (and in fact, for the last forty years, ever since Spiro Agnew complained about the “nattering nabobs of negativism”), we’ve all been inundated with what I call the myth of liberal bias in the news media. Conservatives have complained bitterly that the news media is biased to the left and they aren’t getting a fair deal. This myth has been propagated to the point where many people accept it as fact, when in fact it has never been proven.

This constant complaint tells us more about the complainers than it does about the news media.

I’m old enough to remember the paranoid leftist ideologues from the 60’s. To them, the world was black and white; there was no middle ground. In their zealotry, everyone in the world was (as Eldridge Cleaver famously said) either “part of the solution or part of the problem.”

Fast forward to today. Today, we have equally paranoid right-wing ideologues who also have a black-and-white-with-no-possibility-of-a-middle-ground view of the world. They're just as paranoid as the leftists from the sixties. Former president Bush summarized the neo-conservative view of the world when he said “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.


What does this have to do with the news media? Journalists are trained to avoid bias and remain neutral. But the paranoid ideologues (of both extremes of the political spectrum) don’t allow for neutrality, and since they view everyone as either with them or against them, they view the press as against them. Hence the complaints.

Make no mistake - the complaints are coming from both ends of the political spectrum. For every right-wing ideologue who whines about “liberal bias”, there’s a left-wing ideologue complaining about right-wing bias. We don't hear about the left-wing complaints because the right wing gets all the press these days. As a communications professor of mine said once, when you’re getting complaints from both end of the political spectrum that you’re biased against them, it’s a pretty good clue that you’re doing a good job of remaining neutral.

Let's be clear. The ideologues aren't complaining that the news media is biased against them - they're complaining that the news media isn't biased in their favor. That's not the same thing at all. The next time someone complains about "liberal bias" in the media (or "conservative bias" for that matter), ask them how they know. I'll bet you they won't be able to answer - they'll just say that it's obvious. And I'll also bet that if they do answer, what they'll complain about is an example of the news media not having the bias the complainer wants it to have.

Ideologues like bias. They want bias. They just want to make sure it's their bias.