Liberals continue to see their disengagement from the hotter regions of media as the fault of the messengers rather than the message. A party that offers nothing in the way of new ideas, that retains its fondness for failed policies and worn-out platitudes, should at least be able to draw some lessons from the November debacle. The need for more exciting anchorpeople is not one of those lessons.
If liberals are guilty of mulishness, the conservative approach to media bias is a litany of delusions. First, there is the problem of competing self-satisfactions. Ann Coulter's success, in the face of silence from the respectable news media, is frequently trotted out as proof that the American people are hungry for an alternative to the institutional media. Michael Moore's equal success, in the face of the exact same challenges, is not. Nor is the argument that The New York Times' adjectival choices or Dan Rather's intonations (and by the way, why is it always Dan Rather who gets picked out as the TV straw man?) mark them as anything other than centrist media terribly persuasive.
Good points each, though I dispute the assertion that conservatives only get upset about "adjectival choices" in the Times. How about failing to cite sources that might counter a story's thesis? Or twisted reporting on opinion polls? Also, I don't think Michael Moore has faced the same challenges as Coulter. For one thing, he was a well-known documentary film maker for more than a decade before Coulter surfaced. Another complaint:
There's also a more basic journalistic question. If Fox News and the Washington Times just balance out the partisanship of CNN and The New York Times, shouldn't it count for something that the latter have far more extensive news-gathering capacity? It may be an old-fashioned concept that going into the field, getting documentation, calling people for comment, and other forms of legwork still count as important tools of journalism, but to pretend none of this matters because of the hidden biases of the reporters is to give in to the kind of relativism conservatives are supposed to be against.
Most sensible conservatives don't see "bias" seeping into every single story. (I personally believe that the horse-race coverage of political races is more balanced than many conservatives believe.) Instead, they've noticed that certain subjects, such as race, homosexuality, AIDS, abortion, crime and immigration, to name a few, seem to be covered almost exclusively from a left-leaning perspective. (Again, see this guy's book for more.)
Those are my quibbles with what was an otherwise excellent article. Check it out.
