Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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Journalism Credibility Project
Liberalism’s role in our collapsing credibility
ASNE project doesn’t address a fundamental problem
By Ross Mackenzie
The March-May issue of The American Editor brought to hand an answer
I have been seeking for nearly three decades as an ASNE member. The organization’s
murky raison evidently is to get to the bottom of newspapering’s loss of
public trust.
President Sandy Rowe, her designated successors, and ASNE’s board have
undertaken yet another study (this time for two years) of press credibility.
They have dedicated the organization — verily, its very future — to taking
"the leadership role in an industrywide discussion and the development
of strategies to reverse" plummeting public confidence.
Heavy stuff, and high-sounding. And likely a large waste of time. For
at least one major element in the press’ declining credibility is well
known — and has been for years, though too many self-important pressies
choose to view it with blinkered eyes. Friends, it’s the L-word — liberalism.
The January-February American Editor addressed the liberalism of the
mainline press in some detail, with:
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A box headlined "ASNE Survey: Journalists Say They’re Liberal;"
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An exasperated exhalation by an Alabama editor proclaiming he is "swearing
off the answering of surveys, the results of which are to subject my colleagues
and me to the pain of public pillory;"
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A piece of juvenility contending that despite the overwhelming data, "the
U.S. press is not liberal, except in the personal views of a majority of
reporters." This last item prompted two pummelings in the March-May American
Editor by ASNE members from Dayton and Detroit.
As Carlyle said, "Let any man write six words and I can hang him for it."
He meant bias, slant and subjectivity enter everywhere.
The liberalism of the mainline media is as blatant as a thunderclap:
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It infuses the networks, news magazines, nearly all the prestige newspapers;
it appears in practically every poll of press ideology, as well in practically
every prestige prize the industry awards its own.
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It has permeated the press since the davidic Whittaker slew the goliath
Alger, since the Nazism of Barry Goldwater, since George McGovern lost
decisively with 90 percent of the press’ support.
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It long has been reflected in ASNE itself: In April 1980 at the convention,
Ronald Reagan received just 6 percent of the votes of several hundred members
in an informal presidential preference poll; he went on to carry 44 states.
If liberalism does not appear in Carlyle’s "six words," it does so in choice
of coverage; in angle, placement and skew; in the critical function becoming
the major function; in hiring of the like-minded; in unfettered fascination
with adversarial research. It parades in chichi guises: news analysis,
social responsibility, advocacy journalism, civic and/or public journalism,
journalism by focus group. It pervades the mainline media climate. It determines,
as in the Clinton scandals, the vigor of a story’s pursuit.
Contrary to what a fatuous New Dealer said famously, the public is not
"too damned dumb to understand." It reads and watches and listens, sees
the lopsidedness of what is going on — and, fed up, is tuning out and turning
away.
A press deemed intellectually untrustworthy is a press — like ours —
with a huge credibility problem. There can be no defensible rationalizing
of it, no excusing it and explaining it away — as of course there would
not be if the data showed an ideologized press was categorically conservative
and full of patsies for the Republicans. Imagine the caterwauling that
would go up for our lost credibility, and the disingenuous testimonies
to the soaring importance of a centrism — an ideological neutrality — regained.
Today we have moved far from Trollope’s 1862 observation that "the average
consumption of newspapers by an American must amount to about three a day."
Combined daily readership is declining after a quarter-century of mere
stasis — and it is properly a topic of consuming interest among newspaper
people.
The reasons are many: societal pace, economic and cultural shifts, competing
media (television, talk radio, the Internet), heightened emphasis on self
and leisure and lifestyle, the plunging desire (particularly among the
young) to read. Those, and this: a spreading perception in this fundamentally
conservative populace — a broadening awareness — regarding the overwhelming
liberalism of the mainline press. It is no less a central element in the
press’ credibility problems than misspellings of names or factual discrepancies.
So, credibility? More ruminations and boring self-studies to send us
groaning low? Please. If words and data mean anything anymore, much of
the explanation of the press’ credibility problem — that’s much, not all
— is there for anyone with unblinkered eyes to see. The big hitters in
the ASNE and elsewhere can save themselves a lot of effort by growing beyond
denial, facing the music, and dancing to the facts and data as they are
and not as they wish them to be. Otherwise, soon ASNE may render itself
irrelevant — and with it the beloved yet bedeviled profession it presumes
to represent and defend.
Mackenzie is editor of the editorial pages at the Richmond (Va.)
Times-Dispatch.
