Regular readers of Jon Ham?s Media Mangle have seen a number of ruminations about the mainstream media?s failures. In the latest Commentary magazine, Andrew Ferguson explores another reason for those failures: journalists? own political viewpoints get in the way of a proper performance of their job.
After reminding us that ?[t]he techniques required for a life in journalism are, for most bipeds, second nature,? Ferguson explains how political sensibilities can skew coverage:
The first task of a daily reporter and his editor is to decide what is and isn?t newsworthy, and a botched story can reveal the passions?some of them ideological, others peculiar to the demands of the trade?that play across the mind and heart of the journalist at work. Sometimes several of these urges collide at once, in a kind of rock-scissors-paper struggle for dominance. Recent history provides plenty of examples. You may have noticed, since the Iraq war began in 2003, a surprising shortage of stories about battlefield heroism, once a staple of war reporting. It wasn?t for lack of material. Bush administration flacks worked tirelessly to seed American news outlets with heroic tales, but they had little to show for their efforts. In 2005 the conservative group Media Research Center sifted through 1,300 network news stories and found eight that dealt with the valor of American troops.
You can almost hear the collision of values in the journalistic mind: the primal need for drama and uplift was overridden by a fear of being caught cheerleading for a war that most editors disliked, waged by a president they despised. Scissors cut paper, as the old game has it, and tales of heroism were deemed not news.
