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Media Scope
On Bias, Mainstream MediaIf conservatives talkers dominate AM radio, are they mainstream media?Every two weeks a newsletter called "Notable Quotables" reaches my desk. I read the items -- then re-read them two and three times. Is there something I'm missing?The newsletter is published by the Media Research Center, a watchdog group founded by conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III. The complete texts of the network news stories excerpted in "Notable Quoatables" are never provided. Sometimes the slant of the excerpt is apparent. But more often, I'm puzzled.You be the judge. Here's what CBS News reporter John Roberts reported Oct. 19, headlined in "Notable Quotables" as "Bush Must Recite More Kerry Spin":The attacks from both sides are getting sharper. And in this battle's final stage, the first casualty appears to be the truth...When the President hammers John Kerry's votes to cut intelligence budgets in the early '90s, he doesn't mention that Republicans were doing the same thing...And when Mr. Bush mocks Kerry for showing weakness in the war on terror, he ignores the fact Kerry also talks tough.Roberts is the CBS White House reporter who covered the president's re-election campaign. CBS followed his Oct. 19 report with a story from the reporter covering the Kerry campaign who outlined the Democrat's distortions of Bush's positions. But that balance was not noted by the media watchdog group's newsletter.Here's another excerpt from a CBS news report that the Media Research Center cited as evidence of the network's liberal bias, this one filed Oct. 22 by business reporter Anthony Mason:"Is the average American better off now than he or she was four years ago? Well, this is where it gets a bit tricky. On average, Americans have more money. But most Americans are, in fact, worse off. Now, how can that be? Because average income includes the very rich...In fact, the median household income, the number smack in the middle of all Americans, is now $41,550 $30 lower than it was four years ago."Can we agree facts are facts? Or are we so polarized as a nation -- and as news consumers -- that facts are only facts if they are reported by Fox News or The New York Times?Conservatives and liberals (even moderates) see bias in plenty of political (and business) stories -- sometimes in opposite directions in the same sentence. That's nothing new. But the perceptions of systematic media bias intensified during the 2004 presidential campaign into a viciousness that threatens the public's ability to process information.True, Dan Rather and 60 Minutes Wednesday fed themselves to the right-wing lions, and this CBS news crew deserves condemnation -- and terminations -- for extreme journalistic failures. But so, too, do the right-wing cable and radio blabbers who legitimized and gleefully spread the lies, misrepresentations and inconsistencies of the Smear Vets. Did anyone call for their heads to roll?In the aftermath of Watergate, political reporting morphed into "Gotcha," journalism professors say, and public trust in the American political system turned into cynicism, political science professors say. That said, the state of the news business today -- when shrill partisanship perceives biases lurking in simple recitations of political and economic facts -- cannot be blamed on Watergate. Go back, instead, to the Federal Communications Commission's decision, in 1987, to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. At the time, the FCC said the public interest "is fully served by the multiplicity of voices in the marketplace."Nine years later, in 1996, that multiplicity of voices began to shrink when Congress deregulated the broadcast industry. Today a few companies control nearly all of the radio stations and most of the television stations.One last point: If conservative talkers dominate AM radio, does that make them mainstream media? If Fox News attracts more viewers election night than CBS News, does the conservative cable channel qualify as mainstream media?If so, the so-called liberal media are out of the mainstream."