Though the fact will be routinely brushed aside by liberals, the most important news (or should that be “news”?) media were Democratic Party house organs this election. The New York Times, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (very different from the editorial page), Time, Newsweek and others maintained the veneer of impartiality only to the extent necessary to render credible their campaign in behalf of the Kerry-Edwards ticket. By weight of numbers and authority, they set a tone that could not be counteracted by outlets that strove simply to report what was going on, without fear or favor, such as the Washington Post, Fox News and many local and regional papers.
This election can be viewed as an empirical test of the influence of the media: If the top tier of journalists swing behind one of the parties and shape news reporting to mesh with its themes, how much effect will they have on the outcome? Evan Thomas of Newsweek, in a moment of candor, speculated that the media could add 15 percentage points to its favored candidate’s vote. That is a gross exaggeration for a national election, where neither Republicans nor Democrats are very likely to fall below 40 percent, no matter what, but it is nearer the truth than the conclusion that some will draw from President Bush’s victory: that the elite media don’t really have much influence at all.
To quantify the media impact, one has to ascertain how Senator Kerry would have performed if the media had been genuinely neutral. Suppose that favorable news about the War of Terror and the economy had not been routinely buried and bad news highlighted, the candidates’ backgrounds had been subjected to equal scrutiny, there had been no roorbacks, forged documents or hyping of the Democratic candidates’ mediocre debate performances, and Democrats had not felt free to push absurd conspiracy theories to target audiences (the “secret plans” to revive the draft and cut Social Security benefits), knowing that the non-targeted part of the electorate would never hear about them. Weighing that large set of counterfactuals, I think that it is fair to say that, with unbiased coverage, Senator Kerry would have gotten no more than 45 percent of the two-party vote and perhaps as little as 42 percent. Scoring higher than 45 percent seems inconceivable for a liberal candidate running in a basically conservative country in a time of prosperity and a successfully conducted war. Falling below 42 percent is difficult for a major party candidate unless he wages a boldly ideological campaign à la Goldwater or McGovern.
On that rough basis, which empiricists may refine but are unlikely to alter substantially, media support added somewhere between three and six percentage points to Senator Kerry’s share of the popular vote. That wasn’t enough to carry him to victory, but it might have in less unpropitious circumstances.
This post is not intended as yet another lament about liberal bias in the media. It is bad for one’s blood pressure to complain incessantly about conditions that can’t be changed. Looking at the phenomenon from an historical rather than a partisan perspective, a few points deserve attention:
Although the major media have leaned toward one Presidential candidate in many elections, 2004 was unusual for the intensity of their effort. That I attribute to the War on Terror. Like much of the Left, liberal journalists simply do not perceive Islamofascism as a threat that requires more than a mild defensive response. Hence, they can’t believe that anti-terrorism can possibly be the true motive behind the President’s foreign policy. There has to be a hidden agenda, or the President must be crazy. From there to Michael Moore Land is a short journey. People like Dan Rather sincerely believe that the U.S. government is in the hands of a crypto-fascist billionaire cabal and see themselves as latter day minutemen. In the absence of the war, they would regard George W. Bush as just another conservative, not an incipient Hitler, and their passion to unseat him would be no greater than their animus against Ronald Reagan, Bush père or the Bush fils of 2000.
A corollary to the preceding is that media bias will eventually revert to the pre-9/11 level of “nuisance” instead of “threat”. How long will “eventually” be? Not long, if enough liberals decide that they prefer even conservatism to the ideology of Osama bin Laden. Years and years, if we have to wait until the last safe havens and state sponsors of terrorism are gone.
Have the old media discredited themselves, leading to a new era of “distributed journalism”? I doubt it. Talk radio and blogs are excellent means of disseminating opinion, but news gathering is hard work. It takes a big, expensive organization. It’ll be a l-o-o-o-ng time before Instapundit’s tip jar accumulates enough cash to make it possible for Glenn Reynolds to displace Bill Keller. The “new media” can present alternative interpretations (as they did to counter CBS’s forgeries and the al-QaQaa fabrication), but the information that the public receives remains under the control of the “old media”. Where they lack curiosity, news will be hard to come by.
One unambiguous detriment arising from the current state of affairs is its impact on the rest of the world. What foreigners hear about America comes from our TV networks and is filtered through their own reflexively anti-American pundits. Is it any wonder that overseas polls showed an overwhelming preference for Senator Kerry almost everywhere (the notable exceptions being the special cases of Israel, Poland and Iraq)?
Finally, we must not overlook the pernicious effect of media bias on its beneficiaries. Knowing that your words and actions will be subjected to only light scrutiny encourages laziness and carelessness. I doubt that, in a neutral media environment, Senator Kerry would have put such inordinate stress on his Vietnam service as a Presidential qualification (thus stirring up the Swift Boat Veterans and turning a mild positive into a significant negative), and he would have marshaled his ideas about how to deal with terrorism into better order. “Global test”, “nuisance” and “I have a plan” were mistakes born of media-nurtured indolence. The absence of audible criticism also lulled the Kerry campaign into letting itself associate with unsavory characters like George Soros and vote fraud operations like Americans Coming Together and Moveon.org. Whether backing from such quarters helped or hurt in the short run, sensible Democrats would have rejected them if they had been forced to think about the implications of having radicals and cheaters on board the campaign.
The United States and the whole world would, needless to say, be better off if all news came via fair and balanced reporters. That has, alas, never been the case and never will be. We can take solace in the thought that, in their year of maximum effort, the elite media went all out for their man and failed to deliver the votes that he needed. On the other hand, we cannot complacently assume that they will not try again and succeed in a future election.
Comments