Here’s an email I recently got from a reader: “This article would have been better if you had examined the extreme liberal values that underlie your position. As it reads, it is really poor, thoughtless drivel.”
Lots of readers have told me they are sick of my “liberal” bias, especially after I argued last month that global Islam isn’t fighting a war against the west. I understand their irritation. These people feel bombarded by the “liberal media”. And they have a point: most western journalists are liberals. Some critiques of the “liberal media” are off-beam but many are justified.
Let’s start with the very concept of the “liberal media”. It’s certainly accurate to talk about “liberal journalists”. In a study by the Indiana University school of journalism in 2013, nearly four times more US journalists identified themselves as Democrats than as Republicans. British, Spanish, German and Danish political journalists also skew left of their countries’ centre, says the book Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective, by Erik Albaek, et al.
But as Noam Chomsky and others have argued, journalists don’t make up the media alone. Most media owners, advertisers and readers are more conservative. (Feel the pain of leftist Italian journalists working for Silvio Berlusconi.) Moreover, businesses hire PRs to bully or lunch journalists into being kinder.
Anyway, we journalists inadvertently trumpet the doctrine of success every day: most of our stories feature rich, famous people. Then there are the property, travel and luxury supplements that pay our bills the way liberal rants don’t — and also send messages about the stuff people need.
Here are some other common critiques of the “liberal media”:
“You’re an out-of-touch metropolitan elite.”
That gets truer by the week. As local newspapers shrink, journalists increasingly cluster in wealthy media capitals like London and New York. And as our pay shrinks, journalism has become a fancy profession for people from rich families. Of course, all this should reassure the right: an industry staffed by upper-middle-class whites, and led mostly by older men, isn’t going to make the revolution. Don’t worry, we only talk liberal.
“Journalists are salon socialists.”
This jibe is less true. The “salon” bit overestimates our wealth, and the “socialist” bit overstates our average leftism. Rightwingers like using the label “socialist” because it carries connotations of Marxism. However, today almost no mainstream media (or political parties) meet that description. None favours nationalisation, for instance, or old-style tax rates of 75 per cent.
“You are the chattering classes.”
I don’t know what’s wrong with chattering - or, to phrase it differently, “debating issues”. The word “chattering” implies, correctly, that journalists aren’t doers. Most of us are critics by nature. That’s why we became journalists, not policy makers or business people.
“You don’t understand the real world.”
The usual implication here is that the “real world” is business. Certainly, most journalists lack experience of business. But we also lack experience of other “real” worlds: underfunded hospitals, third-world slums, horrible migrant detention centres, etc. That ignorance is problematic too.
Anyway, working in journalism is increasingly just a prelude to working in corporate PR. As journalists come to understand their new career structure, they will presumably become more business-friendly.
“You are credulous about climate science.”
True. Most journalists know almost nothing about science. Being university-educated liberals, we are inclined to believe academic climate scientists when they say the climate is changing. We just take that stuff on trust.
“You toe the party line.”
Usually false. Liberals are highly disloyal to leftist parties, who are always letting us down. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, for example, is forever berating whoever happens to be the Labour party’s leader. In the US, as Jonathan Chait detailed in New York magazine in 2011, liberals swiftly turn against each new Democratic president. Instead, liberals tend to be loyal to liberal values. A recent Pew Research study of American media habits found that liberals “are more likely to follow issue-based groups, rather than political parties or candidates, in their Facebook feeds”.
“You say liberal things because you are self-hating/guilt-ridden/trendy/politically correct.”
The implication is that we don’t believe this liberal stuff ourselves. Well, I do. I actually think the things I write are true. At least give me credit for sincerity.
“You distort the facts.”
Blatant distortion has become hard for journalists, left or right. Twist a fact and online commenters will point it out. That’s agonising and can get you sacked. Look at the recent embarrassments of NBC’s Brian Williams and everybody at Fox News. Other overexcited TV people may yet get their comeuppance. As The New York Times journalist Nick Bilton tweeted one day last October: “There are more experts on CNN right now talking about Ebola in America than people with Ebola in America.”
“Your article was lazy journalism.”
Lazy journalism is dying out too. Twenty years ago, you could still be a lazy journalist. Then the internet slashed the media’s income and therefore staffing levels, while establishing a 24-hour news cycle. Today fewer journalists produce more material while getting savaged by commenters. Bring back lazy journalism, I say.
— Financial Times
