What Liberal Media?

The cliché that the media has a liberal bias runs so deep that an entire, openly biased news network has used it as a clever marketing technique: Fox News has made its slogan “fair and balanced” despite the fact that it is entirely populated with right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly, with the only occasional token liberal to fan conservative flames of outrage on air. Even liberals often do not argue against this premise that the media has a liberal bias, despite the presence of such pundits as George Will, Pat Buchanan, Charles Krauthammer, and of course Bill O'Reilly in print and on air. The mere existence of a liberal is decried as ‘bias,’ as in the case of the presence of Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman on the pages of the The New York Times editorial pages, despite the counterweight of the equally conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page in the court of public opinion (Alterman 2003, p.2).

In his 2003 article, “What liberal media,” Eric Alterman for The Nation suggests that in fact the media is quite balanced. However, an alternative perspective might be that the media is quite good at ‘selling its product.’ Fox’s technique of right-wing outrage sells its product, and has cornered a lucrative niche for the network. There is a common media slogan for local news: “if it bleeds, it leads.” This has nothing to do with support of a law-and-order strategy, although such stories might reinforce such ideas. Rather ‘bleeding’ headlines are due to the desire to draw the public’s attention with a gruesome story that seems interesting, although this can cause the public to see the streets as more crime-ridden than they actually are, or crime as a minority-based problem, if the images they see are disproportionately of criminals of a specific ethnic group on screen. Similarly, much to the dismay of some conservatives, because it makes ‘a good story,’ the media also love to fan the flames of health scares and medical horror stories that increase public pressure for more regulation of drugs, medical procedures, and health insurance. And much to the dismay of ideologues on the left and right, stories about sex, entertainment, sports, and the weather, are more likely to be covered than stories about international politics, human rights, medicine, and environmentalism. Bias is usually in favor of selling the product and effective marketing the news product in the commercial media, more than an underlying ideological agenda.