Newsrooms Under Siege! Film At Eleven

Instapundit points to the following editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Newsrooms under siege
Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University

News is a messy and elusive form of information. Journalism is crude, tentative and fumbling, always involving compromise, and there's a healthy measure of give-and-take in the process.

But anybody who enters the profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth. And that commitment is now under assault.
This commitment is beyond question in Mr. Wasserman’s eyes. To ask why an AP story describes booing when none took place is to assault the truth-teller when we should just accept that he is telling the truth.

The attack doesn't come from ideologically committed journalists and commentators who put together reports clearly selected and spun-dry to sell a political line. (Of course the attack doesn't come from partisan journalists; they are what is being attacked by those concerned with media bias.) As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact (and who keeps this from happening?), the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.
See, bias in the media is good. The concept of a “variety of information” would be more convincing if there were a variety of view points in the news room. Unfortunately, statistics show that the mainstream media is over-whelmingly liberal, so, instead of one biased story serving as a correction on another biased story, there is a uniform bias that is significantly more liberal than the general population. Timothy Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago performed a study which compared stories by journalists to speeches by members of Congress and found that journalists overwhelmingly cite the same sources of information (think tanks and the like) as Democrats in Congress; in other words, journalists are liberal partisans in their reporting.

Although we expected to find that most media lean left, we were astounded by the degree. A norm among journalists is to present “both sides of the issue.” Consequently, while we expected members of Congress to cite primarily think tanks that are on the same side of the ideological spectrum as they are, we expected journalists to practice a much more balanced citation practice, even if the journalist’s own ideology opposed the think tanks that he or she is sometimes citing. This was not always the case. Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined (ie all those besides Drudge Report and Fox News’ Special Report) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House. pdf download

John Tierney, columnist for the New York Times, did an informal servey during the Democratic convention. Asking “Who would make the better president?”, he got the following results:

We got anonymous answers from 153 journalists, about a third of them based in Washington. When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington. Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.

(Sorry I didn't go for the original, but I didn't want to pay the $2.95.) This doesn't bode well for Mr. Wasserman's "variety of information"; seems more like conformity to me.
The more compelling danger concerns news organizations in the so-called mainstream. These are the country's best-staffed and most influential news organizations, and they're losing their nerve.

I understand why. It's hard now even to write for publication without being aware of just how thoroughly what you say is going to be inspected for any trace of undesirable political tilt and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.
Because, as we all know, only rightist warriors complain about news coverage. Or is it that only complaints from right of center are automatically assumed to be without foundation? And do you notice how journalists and commentators are "committed idealogues", not a free-floating cadre of leftist warriors? Nope, no bias here, move along now.
If that's apparent to me as a mere columnist, I can only imagine the current mind-set of supervising editors: If we give prominence to this story of carnage in Iraq, will we be accused of anti-administration bias? And - here it gets interesting - will we therefore owe our readers an offsetting story, perhaps an inspirational tale of Marines teaching young Iraqis how to play softball?
Notice how he contrasts the two positions. The responsible media wants to tell you about carnage. Those right-wingers want to tell you about a softball game. What about a story about Marines successfully fighting insurgents or about Iraqis voting in local elections or the large variety of newspapers that are now available in Baghdad. You know, something that places the carnage in context: who’s winning the battles and what are we fighting for. But the committed truth-tellers in the MSM decided long ago that it’s a quagmire, so that’s what the story we’re getting.
Now, both stories may well be integral to the news. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the pressure to tell the softball story comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in Iraq, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base.
Of course, only the news media has the expertise to decide which is which.
News then becomes a negotiation - not a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality, as it always is, but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience. News of great significance becomes not an honest attempt to reflect genuinely contradictory realities, but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public, a corrupted process in which elements of the news become offerings - payments really - in a kind of intellectual extortion.

The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, when independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth.
Some detail here might be nice. I do remember stories screaming quagmire and promising endless street to street fighting in Baghdad. If Mr. Wasserman is referring to the failure so far to find large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, I’m surprised to learn that the media knew ahead of time that the stockpiles weren’t there, when intelligence services in the US, UK, France, Russia, and others were so sure they were.
Resisting undue outside influence is part of what news professionals do. But it's hard enough to get the story right, without holding it hostage to an open-ended negotiation with zealots who believe they already know what the story is.
The problem here is that the barbarians may be inside the gates. Read Powerline’s continuing saga of the boos that weren’t (Here and here. Someone at AP seems to have decided what the story should be and wrote that thousands booed President Bush’s announcement of former President Clinton’s illness, when there were, in fact, no boos, something AP later admitted. Of course, by that time, the lie was half way ‘round the globe and truth didn’t stand a chance. I’d still like an explanation from AP as to how this happened; so would the guys at Powerline. Sowould a lot of the people who were at the rally. But according to Mr. Wasserman, telling the truth is a hard job that should be left to the professionals.
Of course, what Mr. Wasserman is attempting to do what Al Gore wanted to do with his “digital brownshirts” speech and that is to mark any criticism of the news media out of bounds, to shame any journalist who might be re-considering the group-think of his profession. Journalists assert their right to question and probe any other profession, but they should be above scrutiny, because they're committed truth-tellers. Just shut up and watch the news.