I get pretty tired pretty quick of conservatives and libertarians who cry ?liberal media bias? whenever they read something they don?t like, or are looking for an excuse for why their favorite candidate or cause went down in defeat. To allege a media conspiracy is to suggest a level of planning, forethought, and malice that, in my experience, is simply unthinkable in most newsrooms and broadcast studios.
However, there is a bias, indeed a left-of-center bias, in the news media. The smarter and more honest leaders in the journalistic community understand this. It?s not a nefarious conspiracy, or even a conscious phenomenon for the most part, but rather than result of groupthink. A disproportionate number of those going into the profession are (by today’s definitions) liberal. The ideological makeup of journalists is quite different from the population at large: more secular, more favorable to government intervention in the economy, more pacifistic (though neither group is all that pacifist), and so on.
Where the bias typically rears its head and does the most damage is in sins of omission. A story runs on, say, the environment and contains only one point of view because the reporter mistakenly believes that there is a scientific consensus about an issue that is actually more complex (and thus more likely to make for an interesting story, by the way, which is why fairness and balance is in the interest of the news business, quite apart from the ethics involved).
But there are also individual cases where reporters seem intent on twisting the facts and misrepresenting events to advance a preconceived, biased notion. That’s what happened last weekend, in my opinion, with a Herald-Sun article covering the Center for Local Innovation?s conference in the RTP on Smart Growth. Over at our Carolina Journal Online site, we posted the story because that’s what we do. But the event described by the Herald-Sun was different from the event actually hosted by CLI, a special project of JLF. For example, the reporter wrote that ?little was heard about vehicle emissions and pollution? at the conference. That?s patently untrue. There was extensive discussion among the members of several panels about the assertions that mass transit would improve air quality, how those depended on the ability of transit to attract commuters out of their cars, and the prospects of doing so. There was also discussion about how traffic congestion (which transit increases in almost every instance) increases emissions because of idling engines, and how to target policies to those minority of automobiles responsible for most of the emissions.
The story wasn?t all bad, and I particularly liked that the reporter sought out proponents of Smart Growth to provide balance to the point of view offered by most of the conference participants. But speaking of sins of omission, this is rarely done when, for example, transit advocates or environmental extremists hold conferences.
