Finley Peter Dunne once wrote that newspapers “comfort the afflicted, [and] afflict the comfortable” (Dunne, n.d.) Mark Twain echoed, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed” (Twain, n.d.) Although nearly a century has passed since Dunne and Twain both dismissed the media as hopelessly biased, little has changed. Print media bias continues to frustrate access to truth and clear thinking for the average citizen.
In the case of the Obama campaign, we see the inherent problem with print media journalism clearly illuminated. Print media obsessively covers magnetic, charismatic personalities who support and maintain an over-simplified narrative ethos, one that inherently polarizes news subjects along confrontational, partisan lines: good versus evil, liberal versus conservative. Issues remain secondary, and personalities that do not fit these tight narrative parameters often receive no coverage at all.
Passivity and cynicism in newspaper consumers is the result. Print media bias reduces politicians to stock characters, and spends more time on their personalities than their policies. This creates a skewed and dangerous belief that newspapers are like any other scripted form of entertainment, replete with villains and heroes, and obscures the reality that politicians and their policies have real and lasting impact on the daily lives of newspaper consumers.
In a perfect world, newspapers contribute to the “shared critical understandings on which healthy citizen involvement thrives” (Bennett 2007: 35).
While Bennett acknowledges that 60 percent of those surveyed perceive print media as biased, he feels bias unlikely to “seep through a code of professional ethics that emphasizes impartiality as a core value,” though he acknowledges the code may be “fraying in some areas due to the economic pressures favoring sensationalism, or in cases such as FOX News, where bias has become a financially successful formula (Bennett 2007: 35).
Generally speaking, Bennett believes the concern about ideological media bias less important than other forms of media bias, because when “reporters lose their perspectives, there are editors there to correct them.
Reporters are small cogs in large business organizations that have a vested interest in producing a marketable, neutral product” (Bennett, 2007, p. 35) Bennett upholds the centrist view of print media journalism, though he accepts that “as the political bounds of conflict within government shift, the center may move,” and indeed has “swung to the Right in recent times, and these swings may reflect more the power balance in Washington than the general politics of the American public” (Bennett, 2007, p. 36)
While “many American are caught up in dead-end debates about ideological news bias that is less dangerous than commonly assumed, few are noticing other information biases that are really worth worrying about. A more sensible approach to news bias is to look for those universal information problems that hinder the efforts of citizens, whatever their ideology, to take part in political life” (Bennett 2007: 40). This outlook is rosy, however, and Bennett’s faith in the centrism of reporters smacks of fantasy.
The Obama campaign of 2008 saw left-leaning newspaper journalists openly manipulating facts and coverage to favor Obama and hobble his running mate John McCain. Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell confessed “that the Post had given Obama front-page coverage three times more often than McCain — a “disparity … so wide,” she admitted, “that it doesn’t look good” (Kersten 2010, p. 30).
Print media focuses almost exclusively on personality to generate stories. In the Obama campaign, we saw the personalities of the front-runners under scrutiny far more than their platforms. Print media painted Obama as the virile, shining knight, standing up for innovation, committed to change, while McCain limped along behind in coverage, too old to factor in much at all.
Members of the newspaper reporters’ invitation-only listserv Journolist conspired online to stage-manage Obama’s “non-official campaign,” and members encouraged each other to “bang away at McCain’s age” (Kersten 2010, p. 30). When ABC News brought a relationship between Obama and militant Reverend Jeremiah Wright to light, Journolist members “sensed a threat to an Obama victory.
They urged their compatriots to bury the story and to attack any journalist who might consider covering it” (Kersten 2010, p. 30). Reporters scripted Obama and McCain, and manipulated the facts to fit the characterizations they had created. Newspaper consumers, therefore, had little else available to them other than a carefully plotted Mexican stand-off between the old guard, McCain, and the bastion of the new, Obama.
Bennett (2007), interestingly, echoes this:
The focus on personalities encourages a passive spectator attitude among the public. Whether the focus is on sympathetic heroes and victims or hateful scoundrels and culprits, the media preference for personalized human-interest news creates a “can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees” information bias that makes it difficult to see the big (institutional) picture that lies beyond the many actors crowding center stage…” (p. 41).
The relentless management of personality to suit a pre-existing narrative framework in the Obama campaign led to Obama’s victory, yes, however the cost was a severely discredited print media.
More importantly, in the case of the Obama campaign, we saw print media bias leveled against one particular target, one that provided the needs of the narrative perfectly – Sarah Palin. The moment John McCain “named Sarah Palin as his running mate, Journolist participants strategized about how to poison Palin’s candidacy” (Kersten, 2010, p. 30) In the words of Daniel Levy, Journolist member, Obama’s behind the scenes campaign overseers “would need to mount a coordinated attack.
“This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say — very hard-hitting stuff … scare people about having this … right-wing Christian wing-nut a heartbeat away” (Kersten, 2010, p. 30) Why did the print media go after Palin with such fervor? She fit the requirements of its narrative, to a much greater extent than did McCain.
In the Obama campaign drama, McCain was a bit too cultured and sympathetic to function as a decent foil for Obama. Palin, by contrast, the “rube from Alaska” that shot wolves from helicopters and had a grandchild from a pregnant teenage daughter made the perfect antagonist (Hoyt, 2010, p. 12).
Her personality was antithetical to Obama: Palin spoke plainly and earnestly; she was earthy, unsophisticated, gauche, mawkishly patriotic, and “ardently pro-life” (Anon, 2009, n. pag.) This match-up made for print media narrative gold.
Print media bias openly altered facts to sustain the action, and its skilful treatment of Palin showed “in the public at large, as well: Interviews of Barack Obama supporters on Election Day last year show them blindly assigning some of the campaign’s most embarrassing gaffes, quite mistakenly, to Palin — when, in fact, they came from Obama. Example: Who said he or she had visited all “57” states? Palin, of course! Nope.
That was our president (Anon, 2009, n. pag.) Although some newspapers acknowledged Palin as an “electrifying speechmaker” who generated “enormous fervor at her events,” this type of coverage remained random and infrequent (Hoyt, 2008, p. 12). In keeping with the print media’s bias for characterization and dramatization over substantial political analysis, Palin’s policies, or even analysis of why she enjoyed such popular appeal, were relegated to obscurity.
At this point in the discussion, one may ask why does the print media sustain this bias for personality over policy, drama over fact? In the Obama campaign, why did the personalities involved trump the issues? Some writers blame news consumers, insinuating that the public wants entertainment only, and that true political analysis would not, and does not, sell. “While entirely unbiased reporting is an impossible dream, why don’t readers insist that their newspapers try harder to stick to the facts?
The obvious explanation is that proprietors use papers as political tools, pulling the strings until we puppets tick the right box. An alternative view is that readers do not want a determinedly unbiased reporting of dry facts, but wish to be entertained and to have our biases confirmed” (Harford, 2010, p. 13).
An obvious point, however, blaming the consumer sounds like laziness. Instead, a deeper analysis reveals a deeper bias, specific to journalists themselves, regardless of their political leanings, given that “journalists have a whole set of professional biases that have nothing to do with politics.
Journalists are biased toward conflict, toward bad news because it is more exciting than good news, and, obviously, toward what is new” (Hoyt, 2008, p. 12). Bennett details the effect that this deeper bias engenders on newspaper consumers. News “comes to us in sketchy, dramatic capsules that make it difficult to see the causes of problems, their historical significance, or the connection across issues.
It can even be difficult to follow the development of a particular issue over time as stories rise and fall more in response to the actions and reactions of prominent public figures than to independent reporting based on investigation of events…the impression is created of a world of chaotic events and crises that seem to appear and disappear because the news picture offers little explanation of their origins. (Bennett 2007: 43)
Journalists favor personality over policy not simply because it fits their narrative, but also because the sensationalism generated by larger-than-life personalities like Obama and Palin are elemental to a print media journalist’s being. This deeper personal journalistic bias, according to Bennett, affects citizens, who thereby “lack the perspective and deliberation necessary to reach confident personal understandings, much less public consensus, about many important issues” as a result (Bennett 2007: 37).
In conclusion, and in fairness, every employed journalist serves an economic master. Economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro measured bias electronically, through endorsements as well as language used in several newspapers, and found that “the biases of newspapers closely reflected those of their potential readership, neither pushing to the extremes nor pulling to the centre” (Harford, 2010, p. 13) Harford cautions this does not mean that “newspapers have no influence on readers.
It’s just that the influence runs both ways. Readers…are offered news which reinforces the way they look at the world, but such newspapers are careful to listen to their readers, too. Commercial survival depends on it” (Harford, 2010, p. 13). Also, as Hoyt aptly point out, bias “is a tricky thing. None of us are objective.
We like news that supports our views and dislike what may challenge them. We tend to pick apart each article, word by word, failing to remember that it is part of a river of information from which facts can be plucked to support many points of view. Perversely, we magnify what displeases us and minimize what we like (Hoyt, 2008, p. 12). In the Obama campaign, strident journalists put their hopes and dreams into a candidate that galvanized voters.
The first black man to run for president came to represent real hope for change, and many journalists not only bought into that story line, but also made additions to it, and steered it consciously towards it desired end of a term in the White House. The issue is not Obama himself. The issue is the narrative that underpins print media coverage. By maintaining a narrative spin on the news, print media journalists create a false sense of simplicity.
Liberals are good. Conservatives are bad. Personality means more than policy. It’s a black and white arbitrary interpretation of truth that fundamentally contradicts the gray nature of life. Life itself is impartial; it accepts all interpretations, champions none, and is inherently context bound. However, “in a world full of left- and right-leaning customers, perhaps impartiality is a luxury a commercial newspaper can ill-afford
(Harford, 2010, p. 13).
References
Anon (2009) EDITORIAL: Palin ‘s biggest opponent: media bias. Augusta Chronicle. Web.
Bennett, W. L. (2007) News content: four information biases that matter. In: News: The Politics of Illusion, 7th edition. New York, Pearson/Longman.
Dunne, F. P. Brainy Quote. Retrieved from Brainy Quote. Web.
Goldberg, J. (2010) The new frontier: ‘Covering’ conservatives. USA Today. 2010: 7A. Web.
Hoyt, C. (2010) Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves. New York Times. 2008: 12(L). Web.
Kersten, K. (2010) Media bias: Where Do They Sign Up? One Place Is The Journolist Listserv, Where Liberalism Is Boldly Embraced. Star Tribune. 2010: 3OP. Web.
Harford, T. (2010) In Search Of Hard Facts About Media Bias; The Undercover Economist. Financial Times 2010:13. Web.
Twain, M. BrainyQuote.com. Brainy Quote. Web.