Bruce Bartlett on Modern Media

Former Reagan budget official Bruce Bartlett offers some insightful observations on media and "bias" in Capital Gains and Games.

I give Rupert Murdoch enormous credit for recognizing a market opportunity to appeal to conservatives who have long felt that the traditional media had a strong liberal bias. And in the era from the 1950s to the 1980s I think the conservatives were right. The mainstream media did have a liberal bias, although it was never as strong as they thought. The brilliance of Fox News was positioning itself in the objective center, which meant, relatively, that it was to the right of its competitors, all of which were to the left of center. This way Fox could legitimately claim to be "fair and balanced" while simultaneously appealing to conservatives, who were happy just to have a network where their issues were addressed and their values weren't implicitly ridiculed.

The problem is that since the 1990s the mainstream media has shifted to the right. I think the old liberal bias is completely gone and every major media outlet is pretty well positioned in the center of the political spectrum today. Liberals recognize this even if conservatives don't. In order to maintain its position a couple of clicks to the right of its competitors this has meant that Fox had to move to the right of center. In the 2000s I think Fox has become explicitly right wing, often parroting the Republican Party line of the day. And of course, it is now the home of Glenn Beck, who is so right wing that he makes Rush Limbaugh look like a moderate.

I agree with Bartlett that conservative claims of "liberal bias" in the mainstream media are a decade or so out of date. Take a look at David Halberstam's 1979 bestseller The Powers That Be to get a sense of this. Big media was a much smaller club in those days. It consisted of the three major television networks, Time/Life and a handful of major newspapers. As Halberstam's book showed, the men running these organizations all knew one another in New York. They went to the same journalism schools (Columbia, Missouri). They socialized with one another and each other's families.

Halberstam criticized them as subscribing to "group-think," a form of consensual conventional wisdom that blinded them to new ideas, particularly regarding the Vietnam war. This small group of men were slightly left of center politically, particularly by today's standards. But, this was less a left-wing conspiracy and more a reflection of mainstream political thinking in the country. For example, Richard Nixon, the 1972 GOP Presidential nominee, took policy positions that no mainstream Democrat would touch today. This was particularly true of domestic issues such as welfare and health care.

Today, as Bartlett notes, both parties have moved well to the right so that Democrats are closer to the center and the GOP harder right. Media has followed this trend. It has also greatly expanded and diversified with specific outlets, particularly Fox News and other right-wing media, playing to niche audiences. Like Bartlett, I am OK with this so long as they are honest about it.

I don't think there is anything wrong with Fox being an overtly conservative/Republican news outlet...I just wish Fox would stop pretending that it isn't a mouthpiece for the Republican Party and come out of the closet so to speak. The real problem is that the left and the Democratic Party have no comparable outlet and I think they should have one. While MSNBC tends to be slightly to the left it is not nearly as far to the left of center as Fox is to the right, nor does partisanship and ideology permeate its entire schedule as it does at Fox.

--Ballard Burgher