Michael Reynolds of The Mighty Middle mocks the complaints about the media’s lack of balance in covering the situation in Iraq, giving a series of hypothetical and silly examples of news coverage of good news in incidents from history and scripture (the Garden of Eden, Agincourt, the invasion of Persia by the Mongols, the bubonic plague in medieval Europe, the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, the attack on Pearl Harbor). Michael’s post was cross-posted here at Donklephant.
I think this issue actually presents us with two questions:
- Are the news media more or less objective in their coverage than they have been historically?
- If less objective, is there a direction in their slanting of the news?
Unfortunately, we don’t have New York Times coverage of the other events but we do have records of the Times’s coverage of the attack on Pearl Harbor and, interestingly, the comparison between the Times’s coverage of that incident and contemporary coverage has been substantially studied.
Michelle Rommel of Western Connecticut State University has published a quantitative study of the objectivity of the New York Times coverage of the attack on Pearl Harbor as it compares with the Times coverage of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The study compares the level of abstraction of the modes of expression using textual analysis and S. I. Hayakawa’s “Ladder of Abstractionâ€. Her study concludes that the Times coverage has become more subjective:
The results of this study suggest that the news media, as represented by the New York Times, are losing objectivity in their reporting of surprise terrorist attacks on America. Although only these two special situations were included in this analysis, it may, with further investigation, be possible to extend the results to journalism on a larger scale.
She continues by offering a number of potential explanations for the difference.
I think we can reasonably conclude from this study the Times is less objective than it used to be at least in this instance. Is this true more generally and is there a direction in the Times’s slant?
Once again, we’re in luck. The blogosphere’s very own scholar of the New York Times, Marc Schulman of American Future, has meticulously examined the Times’s position on Iraq in a series of posts. The first installment in the series is here. The second installment is here. The third installment is here. We’re still waiting for the concluding installments.
I don’t think that I’d be out of line in summarizing Marc’s findings as that the Times’s position on Iraq is heavily colored by its political opposition to George Bush. Now I recognize that I’m on somewhat thin ice here. We can reasonably conclude that the NYT’s news coverage is less objective than it used to be and that it’s editorial position opposes the current administration. I’ll admit that I don’t have the goods to prove that the Times is deliberately slanting news coverage for political purposes. But I do believe that it’s a reasonable inference.
The more serious question, IMO, is what should we expect from our news media? From the way I read the complaints of the Right and Left Blogosphers I’m leery of both positions. The complaint from the right side of the aisle seems to be that the news media should be cheering the president, the Administration, and our troops in Iraq on. The complaint from the left side of the aisle seems to be that the news media are not sufficiently opposed to the Administration and let a little news slip through every now and again.
Contrariwise, I believe that we have the right to expect a greater level of objectivity in the news reporting than we’re getting nowadays. Report the whole truth and nothing but the truth and let us draw our own conclusions.
Have I mentioned lately that I hate the current narrative style of journalistic writing and wish they’d go back to the old who, what, where, when style?
I certainly think that the change from filing reports to filing stories was a bad one for the media, but I think that there was a worse change earlier. It used to be that papers in the US were partisan in the same way that European papers still are today. But that partisanship was declared: the paper would clearly state its bias. Today, the media hides its biases and pompously declares (convincing virtually no one) its utter objectivity. Funny, though, how that objectivity always leads to coverage that matches their biases, once those are uncovered, isn’t it?
The media should just come right out and declare their biases. It would certainly save me a lot of time in figuring out when a news organization is trustworthy and when it is not. And I think it would actually raise the credibility of the media, because the wouldn’t have to so obviously contort themselves trying to hide their biases.
Digby makes a good response:
by digby
Memo to the news media:
The mere fact that reporters must risk their lives every time they attempt to report the “good news” means that the news, by definition, cannot be all that good. It means that all those new schools and soccer games and litters of adorable puppies exist in the shadow of horrible violence.
Don’t be fooled. The fact that life goes on in Iraq, even during a violent occupation, doesn’t mitigate the death and destruction that makes Iraq a daily story of unimaginable terror. Bush and his minions would like to make Americans believe it does, but it isn’t true. All we have to do is imagine if we would agree that a new school being opened in St Louis was newsworthy on a day when 30 people were killed while shopping at the Safeway down the street and four Catholic churches around the country were blown up.
It’s the violence, stupid. Until that stops, there is no good news.
We were attacked at Pearl Harbor, whereas the war in Iraq is not a defensive war, but a war of choice. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the attitude of the general population after Pearl Harbor would be more much more bellicose, which would be reflected in the coverage of the NY Times. In my opinion, the premise of the study is flawed.
I was going to suggest a more “apples-to-apples” war to compare with the current one, but – after giving it some thought – I don’t believe the U.S. has ever engaged in a war of choice on this scale before. I suppose that may help to explain the ease with which the public has grown tired of this conflict. It’s quite understandable why it would be hard to drum up much enthusiasm for an elective war undertaken at great cost.
On the larger issue, count me as one of the (very few) Americans who thinks the press generally does a good job. I don’t think the MSM slants much either way – except towards sensationalism.