A VILE BUSINESS
News flash: American media lean to the left. OK, I'll tell you something you didn't know.
BY KEN WARD

A little-noted study recently ranked the nation's major news outlets and found - surprise, surprise - that the Wall Street Journal's news pages are more "liberal" than those of The New York Times. The survey placed only the Washington Times and Fox News' "Special Report" with Brit Hume to the right of center.

The notion of tilted "news" coverage is reflexively denied by mainstream media types, but careful consumers know bias when they see or hear it.

To gauge how much, Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri counted the times a particular media outlet cited particular think tanks and policy groups. Then they compared those citations with the times that members of Congress quoted the same groups.

While lawmakers were ranked according to scores they received from the Americans for Democratic Action, the think tanks were divided left, right and center. Groseclose and Milyo bent over backward to give the media the benefit of the doubt, listing the liberal Brookings Institution and ACLU as "centrist."

"A Measure of Media Bias" reveals a group-think mentality that skews news to promote bigger government, wealth transfers and racial diversity while denigrating religion, morality and traditional values. In two words: political correctness.

At minimum, this template aids Democrats. Investor's Business Daily, one of the very few newspapers to even mention the study, noted that several earlier analyses produced similar results:

• A 2004 study showed that nine of 10 newspapers are more likely to portray economic data in a headline as negative if the president is Republican.
  
  
• A 2004 New York Times story reported that only 8 percent of Washingtoncorrespondents (versus 51 percent of U.S. voters) thought George W. Bush would be a better president than John Kerry.
  
  
• A 1996 study found that just 7 percent of Washington correspondents (versus)

41 percent of U.S. voters and 12 percent of Berkeley, Calif., voters) cast ballots for Bush's father in 1992.

None of this is surprising in an era when Bill Clinton's ex-press secretary, George Stephanopoulos, gets his own "news" show at ABC, and Sandy Berger and an assortment of Hillary Clinton's former speechwriters work as consultants on the network's "Commander in Chief." But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Beyond the prevailing Democratic affinity, even the so-called "conservative" outfits, such as the Wall Street Journal, give kid-glove treatment to illegal aliens, homosexuality and other "progressive" causes in the name of tolerance and profit.

Since it's all about the Benjamins, the Journal, the self-anointed Bible of Big Business, actively campaigns for immigrant amnesty programs on its editorial pages and touts trash like "Brokeback Mountain" as the "movie of the year."

This works for "neoconservatives," who actually are retrograde liberals committed to corporate hegemony, American Empire and Jewish Zionism (not necessarily in that order). Today's pop pygmies - ranging from Elton John to Rosa Parks - can't compare to late giants like the Founding Fathers, but a steady diet of personalities serves to titillate, distract and dumb down the masses. That leaves few mainstream options for true cultural conservatives who yearn for morality in an increasingly amoral culture. Right-minded libertarians who still believe in the Old Republic are similarly disenfranchised. For them, the Washington Times and Fox News provide thin gruel, indeed.

Welsh author Arthur Machen saw this coming back in the 1890s when he branded journalism "that damnable vile business." He recognized that the media simply serve as the mouthpiece for an unholy alliance of corporatism and post-modern liberalism, spawning an evermore centralized, bourgeois and corrupt Western society. Recent books by independent journalists Bernard Goldberg (Bias) and James Fallows (Breaking the News) update this theme - for which they also have been alternately damned or ignored by their fat and lazy targets. There is hope, however. As the mainstream media's market share continues to dwindle, and the elites of the Fourth Estate continue to insult customers, the pathetic downward slide accelerates for all to see. LW

Ken Ward was assistant managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a freelance columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He writes from Florida. E-mail him at [email protected].