Liberty on Tap since 1984

On Journolist and Bias

The series of Daily Caller reports on the Journolist -- culled from the archives of the secretive email list which paired liberal academics, bloggers and think tank members with the mainstream media -- has not included many surprises for those who view any semblance of fairness or unbiased observation as the calling of the media as an unconvincing myth. So long and good riddance -- in a world where only 29% of Americans trust the media, the concept was on its deathbed anyway.

Many of their conversations turn to the kind of foul-mouthed venom one typically expects from activist bloggers, not journalists for Bloomberg, Time, Newsweek, Politico, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, and more. Some of it is quite extreme -- the NPR journalist caught on a thread talking about her hopes for Rush Limbaugh's death has apologized -- and already, examples are emerging where conversations with the radical online left fed into the musings of prominent "mainstream" journalists.

What sticks out to me, though, was disappointment in seeing that the list included entries from a reporter from my policy area -- Kate Steadman of Kaiser Health News. Writing in the aftermath of Barack Obama's 2008 victory, Steadman g...

KATE STEADMAN, KAISER HEALTH NEWS: i can’t imagine anything like it except a world series/superbowl win, and several of my co-walkers told me it never gets the entire city so riled. i think what makes it even more amazing is the incredible diversity in this city and how we all came together for this, especially in victory.

Those who read Kaiser Health News regularly, as I do, will recognize Steadman as not an opinion columnist (the excuse of many on the list), but as a KHN staff reporter and the primary author of KHN's Blog Watch. You can read more of her writing here. Steadman may well be a good reporter -- I have no reason to claim she isn't -- but her inclusion on the Journolist now makes me wonder. How has her bias fueled what she writes? How many times during her coverage of the recent debate about Obamacare was her reporting on the policy influenced by her support for the president who espoused it? How many stories has she ignored because it didn't fit her ideological framework, or would conflict with her affection for that moment when "we all came together for this ... in victory"?

We have no way of knowing. And that's the problem. Essentially, we're learning that Journolist functioned as a gigantic lobbying shop, providing liberal bloggers and academics with unprecedented and near-constant access to leading media figures -- pairing those who work to persuade America of their rightness with those who still possess the largest megaphones -- empowering ideologues to pass along their activist take on news (dismiss this, highlight this, call this fellow racist, this pick sexist, etc.) to those who are supposed to report fairly. The left's reaction has been to dismiss this, saying that the same kind of conversations have been happening all along -- but as Fred Barnes writes today in the Wall Street Journal, this is not...

I think JournoList is—or was—fundamentally different, and not simply because one of its members proposed to make palpably false accusations. As best I can tell, those involved in JournoList considered themselves part of a team. And their goal was to make sure the team won. In 2008, this was Mr. Obama's team. More recently, the goal seems to have been to defeat the conservative team.

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

As Barnes notes, my conservative and libertarian colleagues naturally seek to highlight conservative and libertarian ideas. We are open and honest about this fact, and we don't pretend our views are irrelevant to what we do. There's no deception here about our pro-market, pro-consumer, pro-liberty approach to the analysis of public policy -- and we are just as willing to criticize bad policy on one side of the aisle as the other. But what the Journolist story illustrates is how dangerous it is when people with large audiences purposefully choose to ignore this fact, banding together to achieve goals and feed stories and takes to a wider audience.

The truth is that when a group of like-minded elites decides one party or one politician has a monopoly on good or bad ideas, these self-styled arbiters of fairness and unbiased reporting might as well be on the campaign payroll. In a way, they were all along -- carrying water for those whose ascension would serve to elevate their own policy views. We just know it now.

Tags: Health Care, Journolist, Media Bias

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Comment by Marcotte Anderson on July 22, 2010 at 7:14pm: Rick, it could be I devolve to the level of my debate opposite. I can't think of a time when I haven't taken Ben's arguments seriously. He always presents them in a sound and professional matter. Likewise, you and Jim, most of the time. I disagree with all of you usually, but I do take your arguments seriously. Ron's on the other hand.... ;)

Can you point me in the direction of one or two of the dozen you mentioned where I didn't take them seriously?

Comment by Rick Henderson on July 22, 2010 at 6:56pm: Marcotte, I'll give you credit for coming up with two occasions when you took conservative/classical liberal ideas seriously. As for the other several dozen I've witnessed, well ....

Comment by Ronald A. Lau on July 22, 2010 at 5:11pm: The difference is that conservatives are not afraid to discuss their idea in the open, where as these Liberals realize they need to do it in secret.

The Left bemoans a vast right wing conspiracy, while having no proof.
The Right points out the exposure of a Left wing conspiracy, and the Left say's its a non-story.

Comment by Marcotte Anderson on July 22, 2010 at 4:02pm: What bothers me more than it should is that it appears that you view just about every conservative position as little more than a talking point.
Oh come Rick. Give me a little more credit than that. There are a lot of conservative and libertarian positions which I find nuanced, structured, and well thought out, and some that I actually hold. For example, your post on Civil Society was a good point supporting your position on the Iraq War. That type of analysis of the underlying, more subtle causes and effects of things is too often lacking in today's discourse.

For my own part, I probably do resort to talking points on occasion. But usually I get drawn into a deeper discussion, either with you, Jim, Ben or Ron, where I will delve into the deeper reasons I hold the positions I do. Take, for example, my discussion with Ted regarding the correlation between tax rates and charitable giving. Before Ron and I dragged the discussion down the rabbit hole, I put forth what I feel was a solid argument for government augmenting the private charity safety net. I didn't resort to talking points that I see.

I'm hardly the first one to say this, but I think a big part of the reason why discourse has devolved to talking points has a lot to do with the cable news cycle and the fragmentation of our time. Pundits and politicians know that if they want to get their sound bite played, it has to be terse and compelling. As a result, we have things like "Mission Accomplished" (used to criticize Bush), or "Death Panels" (used to criticize HCR). These do nothing but grab the attention of the base to rally them to the cause. But they are, at best, very thin arguments that don't hold up to much scrutiny, and at worst disinformation.

Comment by Rick Henderson on July 22, 2010 at 2:44pm: Marcotte, you come at these issues from the left. I approach them from the right. We disagree about major principles and view the world in quite different ways.

What bothers me more than it should is that it appears that you view just about every conservative position as little more than a talking point. I could say the same about your posts. Perhaps I should from this point forward. It's easier to get through the day when you dismiss the other side without a second thought.

Comment by Marcotte Anderson on July 22, 2010 at 2:18pm: Funny, I could say the same thing about a lot of the liberals I read. A matter of perspective, I suppose.
It could be perspective I suppose. No doubt it happens on both sides. It just seems more concentrated (and effective) when done by the Right. I think they're better at it. But regardless, it's still a bit hypocritical for them to attack the Left for it.

Did Jesus say something like, "Let he without Talking Points launch the first diatribe." ;)

Comment by Rick Henderson on July 22, 2010 at 2:08pm: Marcotte said:

It seems to me that conservative politicians and pundits are consistently on the same message and repeating the same talking points over and over again.

Funny, I could say the same thing about a lot of the liberals I read. A matter of perspective, I suppose.

The problem I see with Journolist is that it does not at all appear to be the way Ezra Klein described it:

An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another. The eventual irony of the list was that it came to be viewed as a secretive conspiracy, when in fact it was always a fractious and freewheeling conversation meant to open the closed relationship between a reporter and his source to a wider audience.

And besides, when you have conlaw professors posing a question about whether Fox News' "FCC license" could be revoked (Fox is a network, not a broadcast licensee), well, you have to wonder what kind of other claptrap he's teaching his students.

Comment by Marcotte Anderson on July 22, 2010 at 1:20pm: It seems to me that conservative politicians and pundits are consistently on the same message and repeating the same talking points over and over again until a non-story is made into a story, or a minor story is turned into a major one. I don't know if there discussions where this is planned, or if one of them hears another say something and starts to parrot it and the process is repeated until cacophony is achieved, but the results are the same.

What's clever, if hypocritical, is that the Right is taking this opportunity to lambast these liberals for engaging in essentially the same behavior.

I also feel its intellectually dishonest at worst, and a cheap shot at best, to say that a (not opinion columnist) journalist who privately espouses a political belief puts all of her public writing under question in the absence of any evidence of bias in those public writings.

Comment by Ronald A. Lau on July 22, 2010 at 11:49am: I forgot the sarcasm emoticon in the first statement. My bad

Comment by Ronald A. Lau on July 22, 2010 at 11:48am: It's a vast left wing conspiracy.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal: Spencer Ackerman demanded that they start randomly picking conservatives -- "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

Ackerman, frequent guest on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," continued on Journolist:

"What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically."

Funny how these kinds of statements never make it into his public statements.

On Journolist and Bias

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