One of the twenty-or-so political blogs I visit on a regular basis is Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo. Very smart guy, that Joshua Micah. And today, he has up this post that I think is right on target. I'm going to quote two paragraphs…
So much of the imbalance and shallowness of press coverage today stems from a simple fact: reporters know they'll catch hell from the right if they say or write anything that can even remotely be construed as representing 'liberal bias'. (Often even that's not required.) Indeed, when you actually watch — from the inside — how mainstream newsrooms work, it is really not too much to say that they operate on two guiding principles: reporting the facts and avoiding impressions of 'liberal bias'.
On the left or center-left, until very recently, there's simply never been an organized chorus of people ready to take the Howells of the press biz to task and mau-mau them when they get a key fact wrong. Without that, the world of political news was like an NBA game where one side played the refs hard and had roaring seats of fans while the other never made a peep. With that sort of structural imbalance, shoddy scorekeeping and cowed, and eventually compliant, refs are inevitable.
Like many of our problems today, we may have Richard Nixon to thank for this. He and his aides responded to every negative news story, not by dealing with the substance of the item, but by attacking the motives and integrity of those reporting it. I believe history has shown that most of those reports were accurate — remember Spiro Agnew denouncing reports of his legal problems as "a hoax by The Washington Post?" — and that when they weren't, it was more likely a matter of reporter error, as opposed to deliberate fabrication.
These days, I think reporters know that if they write a story with any kind of significant political impact, the injured side is going to attack them for bias…and they may even get attacked by the non-injured side for not making the story stronger. So what they do is to decide which side they're more afraid of offending and lately, that's been the right-wing. Which is why much more fuss was made about Clinton maybe breaking the law by fudging his answers in a deposition about sex than we now see about Bush maybe breaking the law by authorizing spying that violates the Fourth Amendment. (Also, of course, sex stories are more fun.)
I wonder how many people these days have a source of news they respect even when it tells them what they don't want to hear. I have a friend who follows baseball but never believes his team loses fair and square. They can lose 10-0 but he'll always find some way to claim the idiot umpires made a bad call or that the winning pitcher was hurling spitters or something. There seem to be a lot of such people around so it's fortunate the umps don't seem to modify how they call a game based on who's calling them names. Wish the news business worked like that.