Liberal bias

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

Liberal bias in US political discourse refers to alleged slanting and spiking of news stories to promote a liberal agenda and thwart conservative values. Conservatives say that liberals do this routinely and thereby dominate the English-language media. Liberals say rather, that "right-wing" corporate interests censor opposing views, thus creating an effective conservative bias. Accusations of partisan bias in the media are by no means confined to the US; in the United Kingdom, the publicly funded BBC has often been accused of "left-wing bias" by Conservative politicians and commentators.

Table of contents

1 History
2 Opposing views
3 See also
4 External links

History

One of the earliest claims that liberal bias dominates the media dates back to November 1969, when Vice President Spiro Agnew made a landmark speech denouncing media influence on politics.[1] Particularly from the 1990s onwards, some American conservatives have increasingly voiced their perception that liberals dominate the American mass-media and correspondingly that the mass-media presents a liberal point of view. Many see this argument as "attacks" on print and television, and deny any such bias. Liberals, meanwhile, view these statements as attempts to intimidate the media.

Among the chief complaints from American conservatives is that the US media allegedly tends to present issues in a very personality-driven way, in which the personalities of politicians are focused on more than the actual issues. They allege that the media routinely portrays Republicans in an unflattering light, often making them appear stupid and bumbling. Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, and George W. Bush are often cited as leading victims of unfair media portrayal. The Media Research Council is a conservative organization devoted to exposing purported liberal bias in the media.

Several conservative authors have written books on liberal bias in the media:

Bernard Goldberg wrote Bias in 2001, rehashing and expanding on an op-ed piece about "liberal bias" at CBS, which was then his employer.
Bob Kohn wrote Journalistic Fraud giving copious examples of what he called bias, from the pages of the New York Times.
Ann Coulter wrote Slander in 2002, in which she cited examples of liberal bias in American television and print news due to what she viewed as an over-representation of ex-Democrats in positions of media power.

Opposing views

Liberals often heatedly deny that they, or the institutions they supposedly dominate, harbor or exhibit any such bias -- maintaining instead that it is conservatives who are biased.

Critics of the concept of liberal bias argue that it is largely invention of the conservative right. They point to the control of most media outlets by wealthy individuals and institutions who are virtually all center-right in political orientation and whose interests tend to coincide closely to that of the US government. Moreover, both the print and broadcast media survive from advertising revenues, which in turn makes them beholden above all to large corporations. Critics also point to the worldwide perception that US media is more right-wing than most other democracies, and less likely to challenge an official position than most other countries' media.

Certain neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol, have said that the charge of "liberal bias" has been exaggerated for rhetorical purposes.

Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News in one of those who argues against any significant liberal bias. Reviewer John Moe sums up Alterman's views:

"The conservatives in the newspapers, television, talk radio, and the Republican party are lying about liberal bias and repeating the same lies long enough that they've taken on a patina of truth. Further, the perception of such a bias has cowed many media outlets into presenting more conservative opinions to counterbalance a bias, which does not, in fact, exist." [1]

The article 'spiking' contains an account by film critic Roger Ebert in which a reporter from the Tom Brokaw news show approaches a story with preconceived conservative bias.

It can often be seen that foreign news agencies break US anti-conservative news stories before the domestic press. For example when the BBC ran allegations that the state of Florida had been over-aggressive about removing alleged criminals from the voter register, no US news agency ran the story.