Writing in The San Francisco Chronicle, Debra J. Saunders adds some valuable perspective to the Fox Phenomenon, reminding us of the left-tilting dynamic of the Mainstream Media that gave Fox its fair-and-balanced reason for being a decade ago and continues to give it a huge opportunity today, serving a market that the MSM just can't bring itself to serve.
Columnist Saunders begins by reminding us of the deep bias built into the human structure of the MSM: "Go to most newsrooms and you'll find a staff that overwhelmingly voted for John Kerry in 2004, while the rest keep their politics to themselves lest they be considered biased. A survey of the Washington press corps found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992."
And while most reporters are professional enough to at least think about playing their stories down the middle, Saunders continues, "They can't escape the presumptions that underlie their stories, and they are likely not to notice the presumptions when all the newsroom management thinks alike. That's how illegal immigrants became 'undocumented workers' and global warming became a certainty."
And some, in fact, are just far gone: "They have no idea that they're biased," Saunders writes. "They think their positions are neutral." Saunders cites, in particular, the "reporting" of New York Times court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who gave a speech at Harvard recently in which she "bemoaned the Bush administration's creation of 'law-free zones' at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Haditha, 'the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism' and the 'ridiculous' proposed fence on the Mexican border."
Queried about her bias, Greenhouse responded that her Harvard remarks weren't opinion, but rather, "statements of fact." Comments Saunders: "If Greenhouse cannot distinguish between fact and opinion, why should I trust her reportage on court decisions?"
Precisely. It would be great if there were a truly fair-and-balanced newspaper, to compete with the Times. But there isn't, so we must regard the Times as being subject to a "Greenhouse Effect" that goes way beyond the liberal opinionating of just Ms. Greenhouse.
Most amazingly, this stubborn liberalism has come at a huge cost to the MSM, including the Times. As the eyeball- and circulation numbers and layoffs show, people are tuning out the MSM and its same old preachy one-sided liberalism. And yet even now, the one-sided preachers can't bring themselves to become two-sided; as Greenhouse says, she deals in "fact," and her opponents in "fiction"--how can you ask a self-declared "honest" reporter to print things that she considers to be fiction? They'd die first, or at least go out of business.
And the same holds true for CNN and a lot of the rest of 'em: Their whole worldview is wrapped up in their politics, and yet at the same time, they see themselves as "moderate" and "neutral"--they can't help it if their very reasonableness leads them to like the Democrats and dislike the Republicans. So if you see yourself as sensible and centrist to begin with, it's hard to change. Oh, sure, occasionally CNN will be pressured into hiring someone such as Bob Novak, but for the most part, as we know, the steady drip drip drip of drippy liberalism will come from the likes of Miles O'Brien or such past talent as Aaron Brown and Judy Woodruff.
But in the meantime, by flying into the face of this cloying p.c. conventional liberal wisdom, we have FNC, which has built itself a thriving business in the last decade.
As Saunders concludes in her insightful piece, "Fox News keeps American media fair and balanced." That's a sure ticket to success in the marketplace, as FNC has demonstrated, and it's also good for American democracy.
