By Saritha Prabhu
Thursday, November 30, 2017
I’m a liberal Democrat who didn’t realize for a long time
that our mainstream media is biased. For years, I consumed news and commentary
from my favorite media sites uncritically: CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. From time to time, I watched Fox News to see
what “the other side” was saying.
I lived in a kind of information bubble, but like most
bubble-dwellers I didn’t know I was living in one. Ironically, the 2016
election opened my eyes to this “Truman Show”-like media universe we’ve all
been inhabiting.
My awakening came accidentally when I realized in 2016
that I just couldn’t support Hillary Clinton (I ended up protest-voting for
Gary Johnson). I thought Clinton was arrogant, entitled, corrupt, and
dishonest. I couldn’t believe the Democratic Party would nominate someone who
was the subject of an FBI investigation.
But as 2016 rolled on, I became quietly incensed. I
couldn’t help noticing repeatedly that the mainstream media was shielding and
enabling Clinton in her dissembling and media avoidance. I noticed that the
commentators at CNN, MSNBC, and the NYT either ignored or made light of
Clinton’s many problem areas: the private email server, compromising of state
secrets, and the questionable multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton
Foundation. (Yes, the Times broke the
story in 2015 about Clinton’s personal email account, but I’m talking here
about its 2016 treatment of her candidacy.)
Ironically, had I been a Clinton supporter, I’d have
likely been blind to the media bias. To be clear, I’m not talking about
individual reporting, which is usually great, but a persistent institutional
bias that colors almost all coverage and commentary.
Then I Couldn’t
Un-See the Bias
Once you become aware of something, you keep seeing it
all the time. So, almost every time I watched or read something, I saw the
media bias: in the way headlines were framed, in what they chose to cover, in
the way they devoted the barest minimum time to Clinton’s problems.
To be sure, the media on the Right is often biased as
well. The degree to which Sean Hannity carries water for Trump is often amusing
to watch. But the mainstream media’s bias is something else, and it affects me
personally. It leaves me feeling angry, betrayed, frustrated.
As an immigrant from India who didn’t know much about the
politics of this country 15 or 16 years ago, for years I trusted many
mainstream outlets to give me an honest view of current events. It is now
apparent to me that they haven’t presented an objective picture of current
events, but a slanted, curated version that serves their purposes.
As an avid media consumer, I expect from journalists
objective, honest, fair-minded presentation, and analysis of all the facts
available in any situation without taking sides. Commentators and pundits, of
course, can take sides, but they’re still expected to be fair, honest and
rational. It is what I, as a part-time opinion columnist, try to do when I
write for my city paper.
The minute journalists take sides and favor one side over
the other, and try to actively effect a desired outcome, they lose credibility
with their viewers and readers. Once lost, that credibility can’t be regained.
The 2016 Election
Was a Blizzard of Bias
Throughout 2016, I watched with increasing trepidation
what was happening to American journalism. Many media organizations decided to
suspend normal journalistic practices to save the republic from Donald Trump,
whom they believed was a danger to democracy. I agree that Trump is a danger to
democratic norms, but think journalists seriously harmed their institutions by
entering the fray.
Some examples: The Times’
left-leaning columnists wrote mostly anti-Trump columns for much of 2016, and
acted like Hillary’s problems were happening in a galaxy faraway. Paul Krugman,
especially, lost credibility in my eyes for literally becoming a Hillary shill
in 2016, insisting repeatedly that her email troubles were overblown and a
right-wing concoction.
I couldn’t bear to watch Rachel Maddow in 2016 and still
can’t. She’s a fine journalist who has wide knowledge and command of the facts,
but her relentless, overdone partisanship was and is too much for me.
Things got so bad that The New York Times issued a post-election letter to its
subscribers, saying they looked forward to “rededicat[ing] ourselves to the
fundamental mission of Times journalism.” But it was too late, at least for me.
The damage was done, and I’ll never look at the paper the same way again.
Preening Is Not
the Job of a Reporter
Things got even worse after the election. The mainstream
media, shamed and humbled by Trump’s election victory, decided to attack him
with a vengeance on everything he said and did.
They didn’t actually have to overdo it. By virtue of his
personality, President Trump gave them a lot of material, and they’d have been
fine if they’d covered his flaws and missteps straight up. But they overplayed
their hand, and not a little. Many mainstream journalists have become a little
grandiose. They’ve joined the “Resistance,” and see themselves as grand
defenders of democracy, as brave protectors of norms and institutions.
The result is, you see a lot of preening, grandstanding,
boundary-crossing journalism. It is painful to watch CNN’s Jim Acosta often
preen and editorialize on-air even though he is a White House correspondent and
his job is to report. It is painful to watch White House reporter April Ryan
ask an overwrought question, such as “Does this [presidential] administration
think that slavery is wrong?”
It is equally painful to see that these shenanigans play
well with Democratic viewers. Unfortunately, liberal audiences have become so
conditioned, so bubble-oriented that they don’t recognize the journalistic
malpractice going on before their very eyes.
Donna Brazile’s
Accusations Were Big News
What actually prompted me to write this article was
something that seemed to me like the last straw. It was the Donna Brazile
story—her recent explosive allegations that the 2016 Democratic Party primary
was riddled with malpractice, that Hillary had secretly taken over the
Democratic National Committee a year before becoming the Democratic nominee.
You’d think this was a huge news story, but not if you
were following CBS, NBC, ABC, or The New
York Times. In the crucial initial days, these outlets devoted little or no
time to it. They covered the story days after Politico broke the story, and Brazile appeared subsequently on
“Morning Joe,” ABC’s “This Week,” and so on, but it was too late.
The Times
especially outdid itself. It buried the Brazile story deep within a story
titled, “Hillary Clinton Gets an Award and Tears are Shed.” In the first couple
days when the story broke, I got a better sense of the story when I watched
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” and read Glenn Greenwald’s commentary.
By not giving this story the coverage it deserved in the
initial days, the mainstream media, in some ways, confirmed to me what
President Trump has been saying for some time: that they are often dishonest and
biased. Commentators like Michael Kinsley and Glenn Greenwald have written
about this general bias. I still watch CNN and enjoy the Times’ non-political articles. But I watch and read their political
coverage with cynical, distrusting eyes.
It’s not just our politics that is broken; our media is
broken too, and hopelessly. The bias used to be hidden, but now it is open,
glaring, and shameless. Our media outlets have become very tribal and are
openly rooting for or against the party and politician of their choice—truth,
fairness, honesty, justice, and journalistic principles be damned.
I didn’t go to a fancy journalism school, and don’t even
have a journalism degree, but I know enough to realize that what is happening
is bad, and that when the media self-divide into rabidly partisan camps,
citizens suffer and democracy suffers. When Sean Hannity says “journalism has
died in America,” I agree with him.
No comments:
Post a Comment