LA Times Shocked, SHOCKED, at Fox News Bias

Fox News: How can you criticize me? On what grounds?
LA Times: I'm shocked, shocked to find that bias is going on in here!
[A team of reporters hands LA Times Arnold the Groper stories]
Hacks: Your fair and balanced recall reporting, sir.
LA Times: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.

Tim Rutten, the LA Times media columnist, is one of the few bright lights at that paper. Indeed, if they had one more like him and one less like Robert Scheer, their circulation would increase. Rutten is a fine reporter and a man with a point of view I can respect even as, from time to time, I disagree.

I also know, from some experience, how difficult it is to keep you head in the news business when all around you are losing theirs. It is also tough to pass by a fat juicy story on the media when you job is to write about big media from inside big media. Dogpile is the name of the game in Mediaberg.

Hence it was no surprise this morning when I picked up the Saturday LAT and saw Rutten's Miles from 'fair and balanced'

Now I realize that, in general, newspaper columnists don't write the cut headlines that display above their copy when it jumps to the inside, but it was a rich moment of morning irony in my coffee when I saw the LA Times print in 48pt type "Fox News accused of systematic bias." From within this frame, Rutten reports

A veteran producer this week alleged that Fox News executives issue a daily memorandum to staff on news coverage to bend the network's reporting into conformity with management's political views, refocusing attention on the partisan bias of America's most watched cable news operation....

The corporate boards and family investors who control most of the American news media generally feel obliged to maintain a wall of separation between news and editorial opinion.

Sigh. It's tough being a columnist at a paper whose daily agenda includes such items as 'get Fox news' transmitted not with a morning memo but a nudge and a wink. Still, I'm not suggesting that Rutten covers this because it might make his bosses happy. No. He covers it because it is a genuine story about the media and it is his job.

My deeper problem is that this story about "bias at Fox News" is always cycling through the infostream like some persistent Santa Ana that just keeps blowing. Ditto for the story of "Left-Wing bias" at obviously liberal media outlets. The short form is, in short, "So what?"

The longer form about bias in the media is.... this is NOT news! The Bias stories ceased being news sometime in the, what, 18th century? Bias in the media is something we all know about. "Objective reporting" is something they teach kids in journalism schools before letting them out to find jobs teaching in other journalism schools.

If ye would know the bias of a media organization, do not seek within the scribbling and babbling editors, seek it in the Publisher's office. It beings there and it will, trust me, flow through in shaping and sustaining the company.

Is Fox News conservative in its selection and presentation of the news? Well, yes. That can hardly escape an educated human's perception for more than five minutes after first being exposed to their presentation. Are the LA Times and the New York Times, NPR, PBS and CBS/NBC/ABC bastions of liberal sentiment and slant. Well, yes. That can hardly escape an educated human's perception. except that ....

Except that before the advent and success of Fox News, that perception did escape notice. Why? Because in the absence of a sharp contrast, liberal news operations appear, to the vast majority of those working within them and those depending upon them, as more normal and centrist than they are.

Note in the excerpt from Rutten above when he writes, "The corporate boards and family investors who control most of the American news media generally feel obliged to maintain a wall of separation between news and editorial opinion." [Italics added]

Yes, they 'generally' feel that way if you toss all of them from the Milpitas Muckracker to the New York Times into the same sample pool and generalize. But it is an open secret that the news sources that matter, such as the New York Times, exist in an eco-niche whose composition is controlled by the owners. (Indeed, the "family investors" of the NYT take pains to install a member of their family as the Publisher.) Those that reflect the owners' views thrive while those who do not are only hired as tokens or do not exist within the newspapers' ecology at all.

When the New York Times hires a person whose job is to write a daily item in the Times exposing the bias of the Times' news and opinion and business practices ... get right with God and ready for the Rapture.

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
to see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion."
-- Robert Burns: "To a Louse", 1786

Once you are inside of a specific media ecology of long standing, bias is not an issue. Bias isn't noticed. "Bias" is a resented word for "normality" inside our various media Biospheres.

That's why liberals and conservatives in the media have such a difficult time seeing themselves as "biased." In their minds they see themselves as simply "normal human beings" with the "normal opinions" that all the other "normal" humans around them share.

Asking a member of the liberal press to realize he has a liberal bias is like asking a fish to see the ocean as water. Yes, there might be something outside the ocean but no fish that has gone there for very long has returned, so how do we know?

We start to know when we swim to the surface of our pond and notice the wavering forms of things on the other side of Waterworld; the surface and things beyond the surface.

We start to notice when messages in the forms of hooks and nets start to drop down on us and haul the unlucky up and into oblivion.

At that time, we start to question the world around us and ask if everything really is the water we are swimming in with all our friends. Any evidence of the other world makes us question our own normalcy and, of course, the strongest reaction to these questions is to deny that there's another world above the water; to deny that we are in a universe that has something called land as well as water. We might even send some amphibians out to check on it, but their reports are widely discredited especially among those that exist at greater depths.

Recently, "the Fleet Street model" of a rough and tumble press has landed on their shores in the form of the always-monstrous Rupert Murdoch, the most brilliant press lord of our era. His method is to create media with obvious bias and with a discernible slant. The reason? So people can identify with them, patronize them and earn money for the media operations.

Murdoch's sin is that he is obvious about this and, not only that, it works. The polite fiction of American big media for many decades before Murdoch's arrival was, "Biased? Us? Ridiculous. And if you don't like it you can go elsewhere." Except that before Murdoch there was no big elsewhere to go to.

Murdoch's genius was to find the need for another voice, another universe, in American Media and fill it. And what the liberal media cannot stand is that this approach to unfair and unbalanced and Rightwing news is that, well, people love it. They buy it. They support it. Why? Because they happen to believe that it is, for them, The Truth.

Liberal media, which had a corner on The Truth for a long time, is now finding itself ignored by many people. It is finding that it now longer is in possession of "The Truth" but only "A Truth." Monopolies of Sensibilities don't like it when they lose to a different Sensibility. It costs them both revenue and vindication.

As audiences fall away and readers cancel, the businesses and assumptions of the Truth Monopoly get very, very nervous and unhappy. And they seize upon memos such as the one that started all this and begin to pump and hype them as if they were New News. The memo in question states in passing:

The fact is, daily life at FNC [Fox News Corporation] is all about management politics.I say this having served six years there - as producer of the media criticism show, News Watch, as a writer/producer of specials and (for the last year of my stay) as a newsroom copy editor.Not once in the 20 years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox - including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America - did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

What a charmed life in the ocean it must have been for this fellow during all those years swimming in the vast and warm liberal seas. What a rude awakening to have to descend to a job at Fox News and to discover (since he strangely couldn't see it going in) that the operation had clear and obvious agendas. What a terrible thing to be told that, yes, he had to please his employers by actions rather than just by moving his gills. It must have been shocking and he was, in time, after he left, appropriately shocked, SHOCKED, that Fox News was biased.

Somehow it would have been more admirable if he said it while still employed there. But that would have been too objective and unbiased, wouldn't it?

Posted by Vanderleun at November 1, 2003 3:34 PM