August 21, 2006
The Proof Is In The Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:35 PM EST Mr. Gordon advises me to “argue like a scholar, not a lawyer.” This is amusing, in that I have taken Mr. Gordon to task for committing what is arguably one of the cardinal sins of scholarship: boldly asserting a big idea without providing an iota of real evidence. Several days ago, in support of his contention that the media has a liberal bias, Mr. Gordon tried to reconstruct from memory the transcript of a Peter Jennings report that he recalls seeing in early 1999. He cannot quote directly from that transcript, because he has not located or cited it. Neither, I might add, is that transcript available on Lexis-Nexis. I searched but could not locate it. This isn’t to say that the transcript doesn’t exist somewhere. But if he wants to advise me on the exigencies of good scholarship, Mr. Gordon should either produce his evidence or concede that he has none. The second scrap of evidence that Mr. Gordon cited to prove liberal media bias is a speech by Fred Barnes, a conservative columnist and commentator. Barnes’s speech made an intelligent argument. But it was not a scientific survey or poll. It was an opinion piece, as Barnes himself admitted when, toward the start of his remarks, he said: “My topic today is how the mainstream media...stacks up in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance. In my opinion, they don’t stack up very well.” To be fair, Barnes (but not Mr. Gordon) invokes ample evidence. But this evidence doesn’t necessarily prove his point. 1) Barnes cites studies by Peter Brown and Hugh Hewitt that show that the vast majority of journalists at mainstream outlets voted for John Kerry and/or Democratic candidates for state and federal office. This proves that most media employees are liberal in their voting habits, but it does not show that the media has a liberal bias. I’m somewhat liberal myself, and I teach history. That doesn’t mean that I teach history with a liberal bias. 2) Barnes points out that many young journalists at The New Republic, a center-left magazine of news and opinion, have gone onto successful careers at large newspapers and magazines. By contrast, he claims that journalists who begin their career at The Weekly Standard have enjoyed no such luck. There’s a good reason for this. Compared with The New Republic, The Weekly Standard is an ideological rag. TNR is and has long been a maddeningly heterodox publication. It freely allows writers from conservative magazines like The Weekly Standard and The National Review to contribute pieces in its print and online publications. It encourages debate over liberal sacred cows (like abortion rights) and taboos (like school vouchers). It invites leading scholars to write its book, film, and art reviews. It was an early proponent of Bush’s Iraq War and has since subjected itself to intense scrutiny over that position. You’ll find no such intellectual rigor or even-handedness at The Weekly Standard. TNR places its reporters at good magazines because TNR is a good magazine. I have no problem with The Weekly Standard. It’s a good organ for conservative and neo-con opinion. But its mandate and program are different from that of TNR. 3) Barnes suggested that the mainstream press demonstrated unspeakable bias in its reporting of the Cindy Sheehan story last summer. Even if we concede his point, one could just as easily point to the mainstream media’s uncritical acceptance of the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had WMDs, and that the U.S. had rock-solid evidence to this effect. The NYT, after all, ran more than a few Judith Miller stories in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, and no reporter more dutifully printed the administration line than Judith Miller. 4) As further evidence of liberal media bias, Barnes pointed to a “well documented book written by a man named John O’Neill—himself a Swift Boat vet—who went into great detail about why John Kerry didn’t deserve his three Purple Hearts, etc. . . Normally in journalism, when somebody makes some serious charges against a well-known person, reporters look into the charges to see if they’re true or not. If they aren’t, reporters look into the motives behind the false charges—for instance, to find out if someone paid the person making the false charges, and so on. But that’s not what the media did in this case. The New York Times responded immediately by investigating the financing of the Swift Boat vets, rather than by trying to determine whether what they were saying was true. Ultimately, grudgingly—after bloggers and FOX News had covered the story sufficiently long that it couldn’t be ignored—the mainstream media had to pick up on the story. But its whole effort was aimed at knocking down what the Swift Boat vets were saying.” I ran a Lexis-Nexis search and found that the terms “John Kerry” and either “Swift Boat” or “Purple Heart” appeared in 53 separate NYT articles in 2004. The first article that cited the Kerry controversy appeared on April 21 and showed Kerry very much on the defensive. Another eight generic articles, tracing the he-said, she-said aspects of the controversy, ran between May 5 and August 20. Only then did the NYT run a full exposé of the anti-Kerry attacks. So Barnes is wrong. It took the NYT four months—and nine articles, which, to the chagrin of the Kerry campaign, repeatedly aired O’Neill’s charges—before the paper began systematically reporting on the links between the Republican party and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. I have no doubt that Barnes genuinely remembered history otherwise. But the facts do not bear out his contention. Like Mr. Gordon, he was working on memory, rather than hard research. In closing, Mr. Gordon points to a poll that reveals many journalists are worried about the absence of conservatives in the newsroom, but this poll proves no bias in the actual work that journalists do. So I repeat my challenge: show me the bias.
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