Media Tipping Point?

The media wants to be seen as credible. They also want to engage in left-liberal advocacy as they see fit. And if they're not taken as credible, that advocacy isn't particularly effective.

John Leo suggests that the one issue the media has previously all but refused to discuss -- its political bias -- is becoming less of a forbidden issue. And that maybe, with this latest gaffe, they'll begin to comprehend that they cannot contiue doing business as usual.

Instead of trampling Newsweek—the magazine made a mistake and corrected it quickly and honestly—the focus ought to be on whether the news media are predisposed to make certain kinds of mistakes and, if so, what to do about it. The disdain that so many reporters have for the military (or for police, the FBI, conservative Christians, or right-to-lifers) frames the way that errors and bogus stories tend to occur. The antimilitary mentality makes atrocity stories easier to publish, even when they are untrue. The classic example is CNN’s false 1998 story that the U.S. military knowingly dropped nerve gas on Americans during the Vietnam War. On the other hand, brutal treatment of dissenters by Fidel Castro tends to be softened or omitted in the American press because so many journalists still see him as the romanticized figure from their youth in the 1960s. Another example: It’s possible to read newspapers and newsmagazines carefully and never see anything about the liberal indoctrination now taking place at major universities. This has something to do with the fact that the universities are mostly institutions of the left and that newsrooms tend to hire from the left and from the universities in question.

I once complained to an important news executive that he ignored certain kinds of stories. He said that he would like to do them but that his staff wouldn’t let him. He admitted his staff had been assembled from one side—guess which?—of the political spectrum. This conversation hardened my conviction that the biggest flaw in mainstream journalism today is the lack of diversity

Almost all of the media's recent gaffes could have been avoided had they simply had a few influential (not token) conservatives in the newsrooms, who could ask of these stories the same sort of questions that liberals ask of any conservative-tilting story.