[Media-watch] CBS explodes liberal [US] media bias myth - San Francisco Chronicle - 26/9/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/09/26/INGAG8T2FR1.DTL



CBS explodes liberal media bias myth
N.Y. Times case was more serious but favored Bush, got less play in media


Ethan Rarick

26 September 2004

If ever a story should destroy the myth of liberal media bias, it is the 
flap over Dan Rather's flub. For CBS, the admission that it cannot verify 
the authenticity of documents used in a story about President Bush's 
National Guard service is a serious matter to be sure. People should 
probably be fired.

But the real and long-lasting lesson of this story lies in the amount of 
attention being paid to the apology, particularly in relation to another 
recent case of grievous media error.

Just four months ago, lest we forget, the New York Times issued its own mea 
culpa, acknowledging the repeated use of dubious information in its coverage 
of the run-up to the Iraq War and the Bush administration's repeated 
assertions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In the case of 
one story, the Times flat-out said it was duped, although it used the more 
decorous phrase "taken in."

The two media apologies have a lot in common. In both cases, the issues 
involved have major implications for the presidential campaign. In both 
cases, a well-known national news organization admitted sloppy reporting and 
acknowledged that critical information could not be verified. In both cases, 
reporters were overly credulous in dealing with sources who had a political 
interest at stake -- in the CBS case the former Guardsman who is a vehement 
Bush opponent, in the New York Times case the Bush administration officials 
defending the president's decision to attack Iraq.

The critical difference between the two stories is that the Times' mistake 
was actually the far more serious of the two. The suspect stories touched on 
a more substantive topic -- the reasons for sending American soldiers to 
fight and die rather than the service record of a single lieutenant three 
decades ago -- and the journalistic failures were more prolonged and 
repeated, involving multiple stories over a period of months rather than a 
single story on a single day.

Yet against all logic, the CBS mea culpa is getting much more ink and air 
time than the New York Times case. The Times itself is one example. The 
paper ran its own apology on Page 10, but, perhaps drunk on schadenfreude, 
played the CBS confession above the fold on the front page. Other papers 
showed similar judgment. The Los Angeles Times put the New York paper's goof 
on Page 10, the CBS one on the front page. Sad to say, The Chronicle did 
much the same thing: The Times story was reported on Page 2 in an unsigned 
note "to the readers;" the CBS gaffe merited two stories on Page 1.

Why? The answer lies in the political impact of each issue, and reveals much 
about political coverage in the mainstream media. The Times' apology, by 
acknowledging the flaws of the administration's claims, hurt President Bush. 
The CBS apology obviously helped him, casting a pall of doubt over the 
entire issue of whether young Lt. Bush did his duty during the Vietnam War. 
The difference in play given to each of the two apologies is only the latest 
evidence of a growing, and yet little remarked, conservative media bias.

I do not suggest that conservative apparatchiks crashed news meetings around 
the country and demanded front-page play for the CBS story. But I do suggest 
that as the country's political spectrum has become ever more 
conservative -- dragged "to the right, to the right, farther to the right," 
as Tom Frank puts it in his brilliant new book, "What's the Matter With 
Kansas?'' -- media organizations have shifted, too.

For one thing, mainstream media organizations are always in search of 
viewers and readers, and it's a solidly conservative country. Republicans 
have won six of the last nine presidential elections. They hold majorities 
in both houses of Congress and on the Supreme Court. They dominate the 
business establishment. Newspapers and television stations across the 
country are competing for the same viewers and readers that have pushed Fox 
News' audience past CNN's and made the Wall Street Journal one of the 
largest newspapers in the country.

Second, the conservative movement's hallelujah chorus among overtly partisan 
media outlets -- Fox News and talk radio are the prime examples -- has 
amplified the traditional right-wing charge that journalists are all 
participants in a grand liberal conspiracy. The ironic result is that 
journalism has become hyper-sensitized to conservative criticism, and, in 
the guise of trying to be fair, leans farther and farther to the right.

So when a major news organization admits it may have been duped by one 
source on one story that was critical of President Bush, it's front-page 
news across the country. But when another news organization admits it 
repeatedly botched a crucial story of national security, the apology that 
damages the president's credibility is little-noted and soon forgotten.

If that's liberal media bias, conservatives should want more of it.

Ethan Rarick, a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at 
UC Berkeley, is the author of "California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat 
Brown," which will be published in January by the University of California 
Press.