THE MEDIA BIAS TUG-OF-WAR

Since most of us have some lingering belief in the myth of objectivity, it's always useful to contrast charges of media bias coming from both sides. Here's the Washington Times (via RealClearPolitics):

How, for instance, does this American presidential candidate explain his place of honor in a Vietnamese war museum dedicated to an American defeat? Does Mr. Kerry believe the anti-war movement in which he figured so prominently bears any moral responsibility for the mass brutality — executions, re-education camps, boat people — that marked Hanoi's victory? Indeed, does Mr. Kerry still believe North Vietnam "liberated" South Vietnam, and that the conflict itself was not a front in the Cold War? We saw valedictory comments from Mr. Kerry on Ronald Reagan's death, but we have no idea whether he still reviles the Reagan years as a "moral blackness." We don't know because no one in the MSM has asked him. This glaring failure makes a mockery of the media. It leaves us gasping for facts. It also explains the volcanic eruption of alternative sources of campaign information like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the newsies of the blogosphere, and a slew of independent ads and documentaries, including "Stolen Honor." Such activity has injected vital blasts of oxygen into otherwise stilted coverage.

But from the left guys like Steve Perlstein are griping too:

Democrats' self-fulfilling defeatism is not the only factor that keeps Republican brigands rolling around in the rest of our lunch money. There's also the media to blame.

Recently, when John Kerry suggested, mildly, that a speech delivered by Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi to the U.S. Congress represented an attempt to put the "best face" on a failing reconstruction effort, Bush won a news cycle by railing that Kerry was sabotaging a crucial alliance in the war on terror. It turns out that what the media let Bush effectively forbid was Kerry's criticism of a Bush campaign speech: According to The Washington Post, "a representative of President Bush's re-election campaign had been heavily involved in drafting" Allawi's remarks.

Ideally, our top-drawer journos would represent a check on an anti-American hustle like this. Reached by phone while preparing for the town hall debate in St. Louis, however, Jeff Greenfield, CNN's senior political analyst since 1998, swears off the role. "I just regard this as what happens in a campaign," he says, calling the idea that this election is anything other than a fair fight between two equally aggressive opponents an "essentially conspiratorial view."

"In my view," says Greenfield, "if The Washington Post is able to report the fact that the White House worked on it . . . people are perfectly free to say, 'This is bullshit.' " Kerry "in a nationally televised debate can turn to the president and make that argument." Both sides thus will have spoken; the media's responsibility has been discharged. "I don't expect campaigns to adhere to what I call the George Orwell level of intellectual honesty."

Ever since the days of Joe McCarthy, the claim that a made-up charge by one side is no longer an outrage if the wronged party gets a chance to refute it has been an easy refuge for journalistic scoundrels. When Republicans accused someone of being a Communist, newspapers reported it, true or not; then they reported the victim's outraged denials, the day's work done—no matter that the person's life might now be ruined by the merely invented accusation. With a setup like that, the side willing to say anything to win will win every time.

Greenfield disagrees. "McCarthy won for about two years, and then the tide turned," he says. Nowadays, it would happen even faster, what with blogs and all. "When somebody starts really playing with the facts, there are so many people on every side of the issue ready to jump on you," he says. "Call me an optimist."

I call him an idiot. This is a country where 42 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks, where telling lies before the truth has time to put on its shoes—lies that won't have time to get exposed before the votes, whether the electorate's or the Supreme Court's, get counted—has been Karl Rove's modus operandi since he stole the election for chairman of the College Republicans National Federation in 1973. Punks like Greenfield are Rove's best friend: He's already decided in advance that both sides are equally bad.

I'm with the Washington Times on this one. To me, it sounds like Perlstein is mad that the media isn't even more liberal-biased than it already is.

But how do you judge? How do we know Perlstein isn't right about CNN being in Republicans' pocket for trying to be even-handed? The point is, "objectivity," what the media are programmed to try to achieve, does not existence. It is a philosophically empty set. Any selection of facts into a story contains a bias. The best we can do is let the public determine the bias through the market.

Tech Central Station has the goods on the blogosphere, old media, and truth. Douglas Kern's "Here I Blog, I Can Do No Other" is hilarious (and profound); but Frederick Turner's "Media Matters: A Devil's Bargain" gives the best one-paragraph account I've read of the MainStream Media's ideology:

This collective view emerged as a rather well-intentioned product of an age of wild hope, ill-informed academic speculation, and youthful optimism about the world. Nurtured in the great European and American universities, it was statist, existentialist, anti-religious, suspicious of any science that did not support its views, snobbish, pacifist, anti-technological, hedonistic in practice, puritan in theory, postmodernist in its tastes, committed to a social rather than an individual morality, hostile to the virtue tradition, sentimentally Romanticist in its attitude to Nature (which, in an unconsciously Creationist turn, did not include human beings), relativist about cultural differences, legalistic, optimistic about human nature, and deeply hostile to the marketplace. In one sense it was a nostalgia for the aristocratic European world of our collective rose-tinted memory, when the virtues of artists and intellectuals and university-educated people were recognized automatically, and merchants and financiers were "rightly" despised. In another sense it was a yearning for the dear lost days of revolutionary fervor, moral certainty, "free" sex and callow cynicism about tradition and respectability. It was escapist in its worship of Otherness -- cultural, social, political, economic, ideological, sexual, biological -- and conformist in its anxious attention to the next move of its "coolest" current leadership.