MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 10,345: Here's one of those pieces I missed last week. Neal Gabler, writing in the Los Angeles Times, makes points both strong and weak in this opinion piece about media bias.

Discussing charges of whether big media are biased to the left or to the right, Gabler raises a provocative point:

But there is a third and more disturbing possibility in which both sides have gotten it wrong. Looking at it philosophically rather than ideologically, the real media war today isn't between liberals and conservatives but between two entirely different journalistic mind-sets: those who believe in advocacy, and those who believe in objectivity -- or, at the very least, in the appearance of objectivity. And what we are witnessing is not just a political skirmish but a battle for the soul of American journalism.

He then launches into a brief history of American journalism, reminding us that newspapers of the not-too-distant past were unabashedly biased, and also describing how the "idea of professionalization" that arose during the Progressive Era steered us toward the objectivity model that now dominates most major media outlets.

However, Gabler misses a major chunk of U.S. history when discussing the era of supposed "objectivity" in the media. ("The anchormen at NBC or CBS were seldom accused of bias back then" Gabler writes.) In the process, he somewhat mischaracterizes conservative media criticism of the press.

That chunk of U.S. history is the tumultuous 1960s, the era when most of today's top news executives came of age. While most acolytes of the old New Left are firmly ensconced in academia -- and educating the next generation of journalists -- there are enough of their old comrades in journalism to raise concern. (Think Lowell Bergman, the 60 Minutes producer portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider. He was a former comrade of David Horowitz's at Ramparts magazine. Unlike Horowitz, he has not renounced his radical past.) The fact that the right is disturbed when 89 percent of journalists voted Democratic in 1992 is part and parcel of the basic conservative critique of society's general leftward turn over the past 30-40 years. But Gabler even denies that has happened:

Lest they lend credence to charges of bias, mainstream news outlets seem to be bending over backward to prove they are not liberal and harbor no animus toward the Republican administration, even though the political spectrum has shifted so far right over the last decade that thinking once considered centrist is now seen as liberal.

I disagree with his charge that the political spectrum has "shifted so far to the right." At the very least, it lacks any context. In my opinion, the Republicans of 2002 do not really look and sound like the Republicans of 1990. (Democrats, meanwhile, sound exactly the same.) And sure, we've got welfare reform and tax cuts, but is society really any more conservative than it was 10 years ago? Popular culture tells me no -- for reasons both good and bad. At best, mainstream news outlets are trying (and too often failing) to prove their lack of animus toward the Republican administration because of the effective efforts of groups such as the Media Research Center. And also because of the next good point Gabler makes:

The dirty little secret of network newscasts, and of most major newspapers, is not that they are manned by liberal proselytizers. It is that they are trying to attract the widest possible viewership, or readership, and that doing so necessitates that they be as inoffensive as possible. That is why investigative reports seem so toothless, gumming away at government boondoggles or consumer fraud or corrupt politicians that are unlikely to infuriate either the left or the right.

But Gabler again loses me when he discusses what he calls "advocates." Apparently, they're almost all right-wingers, and apparently, they are gathering attention to themselves all out of proportion to their slice of the media pie. (No mention of the obvious advocacy that seeps into "objective" news stories based on studies from left-leaning groups such as People for the American Way or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or on the ways opinion polls get manipulated for what appears to be political motives. See these guys for more.)

Yet, one would never guess this by the way the advocates have been driving the news. Cable's influence is magnified exponentially by the fact that its audience is more energized and its reports deeply impassioned. It grabs attention while the networks and newspapers studiously avoid attention. It makes news while the traditional networks break news.

I have to wonder if Gabler is watching the same cable news channels I'm watching. MSNBC impassioned? Come on. The only energized audiences I see on cable news are on CNN's Talk Back Live. I watch cable news all during the day, and if anything, it's pretty boring unless there's breaking news. But Gabler doesn't see it that way, and he makes an unfair comparison:

Just compare Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings to O'Reilly, Brit Hume, Chris Matthews and Kudlow and Cramer. Though he calls his show a "no-spin zone," Fox's O'Reilly grills his guests, smirks at their answers and shakes his head in disbelief when he hears what he regards as a liberal opinion. MSNBC's Matthews was once an aide to Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill, but he too plays the cable game by roasting liberalism on a spit that spins as fast as a jet turbine. Similarly, Hume on Fox can barely conceal his agony when he has to report a criticism of President Bush. For these guys, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle, not Osama bin Laden and his ilk, are the real threats to America.

Rather, Brokaw and Jennings are basically highly paid news readers. O'Reilly, Matthews, and Kudlow & Cramer are obviously hosting opinion-driven talk shows. (I'm not even going to entertain his characterization of Britt Hume, which is patently unfair and dishonest.) Obviously, there's a difference. Why doesn't Gabler acknowledge that?

In conclusion, I think Gabler raised some important issues. But he seems to see only the few "successes" conservatives have had in a couple of high-profile stories (think Clinton's sex scandals) and ignores the slanted "objective" coverage of issues touching on economics, race, crime, affirmative action, abortion, immigration, feminism and many more. In my opinion, these are more important than the horse-race coverage of politics and whether one party's mouthpieces are getting more face time on the evening news.

POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: I'm sure everyone everywhere has blogged about this, but here's that article from the Boston Globe on the Blogosphere's impact on the Trent Lott story. I rather liked Walter Shapiro's quote at the end:

''Like every revolution,'' he says, blogging ''is overhyped on the way up, overscorned on the way down, and settles into the middle realm of reality.''

So true.

ON THE BEAT: Here's one I missed from last week, but it is well worth a look. Hank Stuever, a Style reporter for the Washington Post, reports on a story he wrote about a car show in D.C. What makes this piece truly enjoyable is the inside look at how a real, live newsroom operates. Check it out. And check out his other diary entries from last week, here, here and here.

CHARACTER-FREE NEWSROOMS: David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, bemoans the absence of real characters from newsrooms in a fine article.

I kind of agree with him. When I took my current job at a much bigger paper a couple of years ago, I noticed that many of my colleagues seemed depressingly similar: a lot of the men have JFK haircuts and expensive suits, a lot of the women are aerobicized fashion plates, and both groups never smile -- ever. It was a far cry from my days at smaller papers, where I worked alongside failed stand-up comedians, heavy drinkers, chain smokers, convicted felons, co-worker love triangles (and quadrangles), editors who cursed loudly and threw stuff against the wall, paste-up men with liquor bottles hidden beside the wax machine, pressmen who drank beer on Friday nights after the bosses had gone home, and many more characters. And though I'm very happy in my new job, I miss the old days sometimes.

BACK TO WORK: I'm back after a fantastic holiday. I visited two wonderful families, saw some old friends and ate a ton of great food. Now it's back to the grind of work -- and blogging. We'll see what's out there today.

HOW THE LOTT STORY GOT MISSED: Paul Janensch, a former newspaper editor who is now a journalism instructor, explains how the Trent Lott story may have been missed by the media when it first broke:

How could Washington journalists, supposedly the cream of the crop, have failed to pick up on Lott's statement at the beginning? (And many of you thought they were all liberals eager to bash conservatives.)

When I worked in Washington, I was struck by how boring it can be to cover a carefully scripted event. Often the reporters there already know how they will frame their stories and don't pay attention to what's actually said at a Congressional hearing or a press briefing.

Or a birthday party.

Hmm. This echoes what I wrote the other day.

POWERS SURGE: In light of Trent Lott's announcement that he will step down as majority leader, I present William Powers' excellent take on the whole situation:

Why the Lott story took off so slowly is a good question. But just as good, and in some ways more intriguing, is the opposite question of why this story took off at all, and once it did, why it had such staying power. After all, Lott is not the first national political figure to say or do something that most people found deeply wrong. In a television interview just last year, Sen. Robert C. Byrd twice used the phrase "white niggers." But when Byrd apologized, the story went away. There are countless other examples of pols who spoke or behaved offensively, performed some act of contrition, and returned to business as usual.

Why do some transgressors become such pariahs that they are driven out of public life (think Jim Wright, Bob Packwood), while others not only survive their ignominy but go on to prosper (Bill Clinton)? Every scandal is different, of course, and the rules of the game change over time. It's hard to imagine Ted Kennedy, or any other national figure, surviving a Chappaquiddick-like incident today.

But there is one factor that plays a huge role in all these stories, and yet it has been scarcely mentioned in the last few weeks: goodwill. I mean that free-floating sense of generosity and tolerance that allows us to excuse errors, often very grievous ones, made by certain public figures. Over time, as they emerge into public consciousness, some pols manage to build up major stores of this stuff, and it keeps them afloat in a time of scandal. Others accrue little or no goodwill, and when these unfortunate souls get in trouble, they sink like a stone.

Based on the events of the last week, we can safely place Lott among the goodwill-deficient. It's true his story took several days to get traction, but once it did, it soon became clear that very few people in politics or the media had warm feelings of any kind about the Senate majority leader.

Just go read the whole thing.

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 3,964: Michael Kelly continues his short series on media bias. (Here's the first part.) This time, he's got some statistics from the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

There's one passage I wanted to highlight from Kelly's latest column:

To this, we journalists argue that we -- unique among humans -- are able to see the world and its events free from the prejudices of our own vantage points. How can this be? Because, we say, of our professional training and discipline.

But we don't have any professional training or discipline. Journalism is not a profession in the sense of medicine or law or science. Journalists do not go through years of brutal academic apprenticeship designed to inculcate adherence to an agreed-upon code of ethics (such as the Hippocratic oath) or an agreed-upon method of truth-determining (such as the method of scientific inquiry). We are not required to meet any standards of knowledge. We are not certified. We operate under no mandated professional set of rules. We need not even be decently educated, as consumers of news frequently notice.

And even if we really were trained professionals, we still would not be able to attain the godlike ability to perceive and present the "objective" truth on all matters that come before us. Because we are, in fact, not unique among humans.

Amen to that.

That's about all I've got time for today, folks. It's going to be one of those days.

SPRINGSTEEN MUST BE BUSY: Eric Alterman has a scathing review of Bob Woodward's "Bush at War." Alterman makes some good points, and Bob Woodward is certainly an easy target, but one question keeps nagging me: If Woodward had used his "unorthodox sourcing and journalistic writing techniques" to make the president look like a complete jackass, do you think Alterman would still be critical of the book? Discuss among yourselves.

MORE ON LOTT: National Review has a column on the bashing Trent Lott is taking in newspapers in his home region. Here's the "nut graf" (or grafs):

Thoughtful conservatives here, as in the rest of the country, share a deep philosophical commitment to color-blindness under the law — combined with a Jack Kemp-like enthusiasm for market-based anti-poverty incentives that would be particularly beneficial to black Americans trapped in downtrodden neighborhoods.

While rejecting racial preferences under the law, we also realize that racism still exists and still is hurtful....Conservative defenders of Mr. Lott may have reason to react against "politically correct" tendencies to see racists behind every tree. But words such as Lott uttered, words that truly are racially divisive on their face, only feed those leftist tendencies to conflate benevolent conservative policy positions with the daily racism on golf courses and in restaurants that black Americans still experience.

Just go read the whole thing.

THE TIMES HAVE PASSED THE TIMES BY: The Weekly Standard has a nice piece on the Augusta National brouhaha at the New York Times. But it's not mere Times-bashing. Here's a longish excerpt that I think is pretty important:

No paper in the country takes itself as seriously as the Times does, and it is hard to imagine another paper acting quite as the Times did in this case. Yet the story of the spiked columns is about more than the Times. In fact, it is a story about the old--i.e., the establishment--media. And the story shows why their influence has waned.

By "establishment media" I mean the several national newspapers of 50 and 60 years ago, including the Times, later joined by the TV networks. They determined what was news. And for them, news had a certain authority. Indeed, as Walter Lippmann contended, news precluded argument--or at least any argument that might conflict with what the "news" was believed to support.

That understanding of news still has adherents in high places at the Times. That explains why there was no rush to get the dissenting columns into print. It also explains why, as Jack Shafer, the press writer for slate.com, has written, the Times so scrupulously avoids self-criticism.

The Times doesn't provide forums--as other papers do--where its work can be questioned. It has no ombudsman, nor an in-house media reporter allowed to treat the Times like any other institution. And why not? Because such forums and such writers are unnecessary. News, you see, precludes argument.

The problem with that understanding of news--and of doing journalism--is that in the long run it isn't going to prove adequate. As regards public affairs, man--especially democratic man--is made for argument. In "The Revolt of the Elites," the sociologist Christopher Lasch explained why. It is only in the course of argument, he wrote, that "we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn."

The article also mentions bloggers (several by name and URL) who are helping promote arguments and debates on matters of public interest. Check it out.

LILEKS ON PIZZA: I'm one of many fans of James Lileks, and, judging by the quote I ripped off from one of his posts earlier this year, he's a fan of this blog, too. However, I've got to say the guy has some bizarre tastes in pizza.

A quarter-inch of sauce? Wow. I used to work at Domino's in college, and occasionally we would get orders for pizza with extra sauce. It was once my misfortune to sample one of these pies, and it was simply awful. With each bite, the sauce would squirt out of the corners of my mouth. The overload of thick red liquid had transformed the crust into a soggy mess, and overpowered the cheese and toppings. Ugh. Give me light sauce every time. (Holds up better in transit, by the way.) Or, if you really want to be my friend, send me a white pie. It has no tomato sauce at all. Just lots of cheese, garlic and a thin layer of olive oil. Pure heaven, especially with pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives and onions.

Any thoughts out there on this? What's your favorite pizza? Leave a comment below if you'd like.

HERE'S THE SCOOP: Sridhar Pappu of the New York Observer has the inside story on how those two spiked Augusta National columns were resurrected in the New York Times. It's so good, so chock-full of juicy insider stuff, that I'm not going to bother excerpting any of it. Just go read it.

MISSISSIPPI MEMORIES: Gregory Favre, who works for the Poynter Institute, has an excellent piece today on the "Old Mississippi" Trent Lott was fondly recalling during Strom Thurmond's birthday party. In the column, Favre also recalls brave white journalists such as Hodding Carter II:

Carter owned and edited the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials condemning racial bigotry. The Mississippi House once passed a resolution —89-19— calling Carter a liar. He then wrote that by a vote of one to zero the House contained 89 liars. "Those 89 character mobbers can go to hell, collectively or singly, and wait till I back down," he said.

It's hard to imagine ANY newspaper editor writing words like that these days. Then again, the stakes were much higher. Carter was a lone voice working in the midst of a low-level guerrilla war.

INTERNET LIBEL CASE: A Virginia court has thrown out a prison warden's suit against two Connecticut newspapers that could have had a chilling effect on Internet news postings. (In a nutshell, the warden believed that negative stories about him posted on the papers' Web sites could be read in his home state of Virginia, which is much different from a news story published in a paper hundreds of miles away that no one in your hometown would ever read.) Here's the story.

MORE ON GORE: In a short, piquant piece, The American Prowler looks at an Al Gore story that was somehow overlooked by the Vast Right-Wing Media Conspiracy. Check it out.

TAKE A TABLET: Editor & Publisher takes a look at a PC designed specifically for reading online newspapers. Very interesting, though I still wonder about the practicality of this. I guess it would appeal to people like the Amazing Techie Girlfriend who are already toting around an assload of electronics crap everywhere they go.

BIASED LANGUAGE: John Rosenberg of Discriminations points out a newspaper editorial that uses subtle yet biased language to cast conservatives in a negative light. Here's the passage John identified in the Gainesville (Ga.) Times:

Ironically, some conservative commentators are among Lott's strongest critics. They know that his presence will continue to hurt the GOP's credibility with minority voters and its ability to expand its diversity.

And John nails the reason why this passage made it into print:

Why is it ironical that conservatives are among Lott's harshest critics? Because conservatives are so widely thought to be racists.

I'm reminded of an incident at my own paper several months ago. While editing a profile of a developer, I came across a description of the story's subject as "politically conservative yet personally generous." Now, this story had already been through two senior editors who are paid at a scale far above my own, and neither of them noticed this patently unfair description of conservatives. So I changed the passage to read "politically conservative and personally generous."

Nobody really seemed to notice; it was such a minor thing, anyway. But to me, it was a perfect example of the mind-set of far too many of my colleagues.

For the record, I don't encounter this kind of bias every day. But it certainly crops up from time to time.

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 3,976: Jeff Jacoby takes on the argument that the media are turning right. Check it out.

MORE ON LOTT: Howard Kurtz summarizes the media's slow reaction to Trent Lott's pro-segregation comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.

The other day, I blogged about possible reasons for a slow reaction to Lott in the editorial pages. Today, Kurtz details reasons why reporters on hand when the remarks were made may have been asleep at the switch:

Baltimore Sun reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis says there was so much "tongue-in-cheek" talk at Thurmond's birthday party "that a lot of us probably tuned out remarks that we might have been more careful listening to if it hadn't been such a jubilant atmosphere. Most people were writing this as a featury 100th-birthday bash."

This makes some sense to me. It would have been one thing if Lott made his comments during a political speech at a more formal event. I can guarantee you there would have been an immediate reaction. These comments came at an informal event, and Thurmond's birthday was a story that was almost certainly a low priority for news organizations that were covering it. Of course, the media (prodded by bloggers, as Kurtz points out) have made this into a huge story since then.