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Media Views

BusinessWeek: The Extremely Tired and Overemphasized Notion of Liberal Media Bias, and That MSNBC.com Story About Same (6/21/07) by Jon Fine

Taking issue with Bill Dedman's "simple-minded, blunt-tool kind of story" about "143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign." Dedman counted 125 giving money to "Democrats and liberal causes" while "only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties"—which "inevitably" was run under a Drudge Report headline proclaiming "'Reporters Give Money to Dems Over Republicans 9 to 1,' even though the data...does not get you to that conclusion." Fine states flatly that "if you’re doing on-air reporting, you should not be shilling for Obama," but "refuse[s] to get exercised about maintaining a myth of journalistic objectivity":
Needless to say, Drudge did not pay attention to which employees were giving what, and so people whose jobs do not remotely touch on politics—or even reporting, in the case of the critics and sports statistician and the designers and copy editors—somehow still count as evidence of the Media’s Massive Democratic Conspiracy.


Fine quotes New York Times columnist Randy Cohen's point that "few papers would object to a journalist donating to the Boy Scouts or joining the Catholic Church" despite the Scouts' "official policy of discriminating against gay children" and the church's "views on reproductive rights," and updates us about the "idiocy" of a deal for Cohen's column to run in the Spokane Spokesman-Review being canceled because Cohen "gave $585 to MoveOn.org in 2004."

See also Media Matters: Dedman, Walking (6/21/07) by Eric Alterman.

Dedman's story is misleading because its primary assumption is that journalists determine the content of the news. I think it would be a lot more useful for him to report on, say, the political contributions of the General Electric Co. that owns NBC and MSNBC, which, I would argue, is a great deal more influential than any journalist's particular feeling. Ditto the Walt Disney Company, Viacom and of course Fox. (Rupert Murdoch has admitted, publicly, that he deployed Fox, et al, in support of Bush's war in Iraq.)


And see JournalismProfessor.com: On Journalists and Political Donations (6/22/07) by Chris Daly.

Dedman’s report violates one of the first rules about working with numbers in journalism: PROVIDE CONTEXT.

The details are moderately interesting, but they really vanish into air when you read the (literal) fine print. In a sidebar box, in a smaller type size, Dedman notes that there are approximately 100,000 newsroom employees nationwide. By my calculations, then, the number of donors comes to 0.1% In other words, the headline could have been:

99.9% of U.S. Journalists Do Not Donate to Politicians

...A lot of the people he “exposes” in this piece are ridiculously peripheral to the coverage of partisan politics –-gardening editors, rock critics and the like. It’s pretty slim pickings. More outrageously, Dedman decided to exclude “executives” from his investigation, without offering a convincing rationale. Where are Roger Ailes? Rupert Murdoch? Heck, where’s the ultimate boss of MSNBC, Jeffrey Immelt? The decisions that these executives make about staffing levels, budgets and such have far more impact on the practice of journalism than someone like John Lahr, the estimable theater critic at the New Yorker.


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