Can you believe that Jonah Goldberg is concerned about the tone? I’d like to tell Jonah Goldberg what I think about the “liberal media.” I think you can see liberal media if you watch Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. You used to see liberal media for an hour on Friday night when Bill Moyers had a show on PBS. I think it’s fair to say that MSNBC has a liberal nighttime lineup. If you want to find any other liberal media on your teevee, you’re going to have to start surfing the local programming channels because Donna Brazille and James Carville don’t count. Or, you can pay some extra money to get the cable company to turn on Current TV, where Keith Olbermann currently toils in anonymity. We have nothing to compare to Fox News.
You can tell me that that’s because no one wants to watch liberal television, and maybe that’s true in relative terms. That doesn’t do much for the argument that the broadcast media has a liberal bias, though, does it? And speaking of broadcast, no one is stupid enough to argue that radio has a liberal bias.
So, that leaves print journalism. And, here, people like Jonah Goldberg can at least make a plausible argument that liberals outnumber conservatives. But it’s worth noting that even ostensibly liberal newspapers like the Washington Post have three times as many conservative columnists as they have liberals. The Wall Street Journal is now owned by Rupert Murdoch. So, we’re left looking for liberal bias at the New York Times, but the Times is much more representative of the mainstream Democratic Party than its left-wing.
I think Republicans are simply wrong about there being a liberal bias in the media. Ninety-eight percent of the news people consume is created by huge corporations that have interests very much in conflict with liberals. If a liberal shrieker can make them some money, they’ll tolerate him or her for a while, but eventually they’ll have a little talk about what it means to work for the Establishment (see Phil Donahue, Ashley Banfield, Keith Olbermann, Cenk Uygur). Glenn Beck can tell you that there are limits on the right, as well.
What I think Goldberg means when he talks about liberal bias in the media (at least, when he’s being sincere) is that most reporters are not conservative in their personal lives. They went to college and learned about evolution and plate tectonics and economics and history, and they tend not to think magically about things like what will reduce unwanted pregnancies or whether or not the Book of Genesis is literally true. They think climate science skeptics are morons because reporters tend to defer to scientists on scientific questions, instead of Exxon’s astroturfed “experts.” If the definition of a liberal is that they’re not an evangelical Christian, then yes, we have a liberal media. But that’s the problem. We used to have conservatives in this country who didn’t believe six impossible things before breakfast. We no longer do.
