Allegations of bias by prominent Democrats have raised healthy issues about news media in the US. The question most in need of an airing, however, has so far escaped the uproar.
Complaints about conservative prejudice in the media surfaced in recent weeks from former President Bill Clinton, former Vice-President Al Gore, and Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), soon-to-be former majority leader.
Clinton blasted "an increasingly right-wing and bellicose conservative press" and charged the mainstream media with complacency for yielding to conservative pressure. Gore spoke of a "fifth column" of conservatives with "pervasive impact" in the media. Daschle complained of a "very shrill edge" in the commentary of conservative media celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh. He even hinted that the emotionalism in some of that commentary creates threats to the well-being of public officials and their families.
Sound observations
Some of this bitterness oozes from wounds Democrats sustained in last month's congressional elections. But the observations are sound. The unashamedly conservative branch of the US media has flourished in the past decade or so. Radio talk shows, predominantly conservative, have proliferated. If mainstream news organizations have warmed to conservative perspectives, it can be argued that they're only being responsive to legitimate complaint. After the broadsides from Democratic luminaries, they'll probably swing the other way.
There's nothing wrong with this. Perpetual self-correction is essential to journalism. But oscillating between conservatism and liberalism won't sufficiently improve media performance.
The problem isn't that the media in general are too conservative or too liberal. It's that they're institutionally ignorant. In pursuit of objectivity, the general media refuse to learn anything. An increasingly complex world thus withdraws from their comprehension.
This happens because of a prejudice that receives little notice. It's a preference for politics. Until a problem becomes political, the general media tend to ignore it or leave it in obscure realms of specialty coverage. Then they cover it like a sport, focusing on winners and losers rather than causes and consequences.
This is how global warming became a celebrity cause. A scientist with an alarming theory received a sympathetic hearing in the late 1980s before a Senate committee—chaired by Gore—and a political issue was born. Since then the scientist has questioned his own theory and appealed for attention to the bewildering uncertainty of climate science. But the original theory is fixed in popular belief, and the political issue has a life of its own. When doubters of the theory call for more study, therefore, their suggestions become a political position needing to be "balanced" by alarmist importunity. And the general media both miss the story and—worse—mislead people dependent on them for information about a complex question that should be more about science than politics.
In similar fashion, the oil and gas industry suffers from the media's reluctance to learn much about its operations. Modern industry work is technically complex and therefore daunting to most news people. It usually doesn't make the news at all unless tangled in some political controversy. Then convention dictates that the media consult industry sources not for technical explanations only they can provide but for obligatory elaborations of position. So nobody learns anything.
Isolated exceptions to these generalities exist, of course. Some reporters do regularly talk with representatives of oil and gas companies—and of this journal—without acting as though they've compromised their professionalism for having done so. But not many. The proof of that scarcity is a public that perceives the industry as being as environmentally blundering and commercially arrogant as it was a century ago—and treats it accordingly in politics.
Industry blame
The industry deserves some of the blame here. Its relations with the general media have become defensive, its outreach efforts shrunken by budget cuts. Given the media's reluctance to learn anything, this is understandable. But it's no reason to retreat toward insularity, which can only aggravate the problem.
The general media in the US are the world's best. But they could be better by relaxing their fixation on politics and devotion to conservative-liberal ping-pong. As an influence on modern lives, politics has yielded ground to technology, science, and economics—about which most news organizations have much to learn.
