Republicans have campaigned against the press even longer than journalists have worried about press bias, so there wasn’t much new last week when Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell released a poll suggesting that a majority of Kentucky voters consider The Courier-Journal biased.
But, when Kentucky’s senior senator contended that The C-J is “biased, out-of-touch and irrelevant” he raised a question worth considering: How does the public’s perception that the press is biased affect citizens’ actions? Or, put another way, can the press fulfill its Constitutional mandate to provide the information citizens need for public discussion, activism and elections if readers think their newspaper is biased?
It’s the sort of question people in a democracy ought to pause and think about every so often.
I spent a day talking to pundits who study public policy issues, academics who study journalism, and pollsters who take the public pulse. I emerged thinking I’d heard good news for the democracy: Voters are capable of thinking for themselves.
But, while researchers have produced reams of poll results showing that readers see bias in their newspapers, I found none who has probed deeply into whether that bias changes the way voters react to the electoral process.
“There’s not an easy answer to it,” says Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
“Bias in the newspaper is not necessarily political,” cautioned Dr. Christine D. Urban, president of the Massachusetts polling company, Urban & Associates Inc., who has long done polling for newspapers.
A 1999 study Urban led for the American Society of Newspaper Editors showed that 78 percent of U.S. adults agree with the statement that there is bias in the news media. The study concluded that bias is among the problems costing newspapers credibility.
But, researchers have found that bias means different things to different readers.
A Freedom Forum study found some readers who consider “negative” bias a problem.
Readers see newspapers as exploitive, lacking fairness, too ready to assume people are guilty and too eager to make news rather than report it, said Andrew Kohut, director of The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press.
Journalists aren’t likely to argue much. Separate studies by Urban and the Pew center found journalists deeply concerned about credibility, accuracy and biases linked to issues such as race, economics, religion and political leanings.
Some of that journalistic concern is rooted in economics. When people don’t believe their newspaper, they stop buying it. Those of us who worry about citizenship can fret, too, however because people who don’t read the paper are also less likely to vote.
Some deep thinkers who have considered the edges of my question believe readers are reacting, in part, to changes in the way journalists cover the news.
Reporters, who once simply covered what sources said, now examine the process of government and politics in stories that can be more subjective and analytical than a routine speech report. Sometimes when they delve into a controversial issue, reporters abandon the old principle of equal play to give the most weight to experts with the strongest credentials.
Coverage of government agencies tends to focus on the need for something to change, and that often looks like liberal bias to conservative readers, one said.
As politics has become more polarized, journalistic coverage has been biased toward covering conflict, said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political science professor who co-authored Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness.
Coverage amplifies the conflict so “the public sitting at home says, ‘What a food fight!’ ” said Jacobs. Then they don’t vote or get involved in the political process, thinking ” ‘why do it? . . . (the politicians) don’t listen to me anyway.’ ”
The public needs a better understanding of a newspapers’ role and of its obligations to provide both news and fact-based opinion, said Fay Lomax Cook, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She noted that since Watergate, the public has become disillusioned with all institutions.
Indeed, a January Harris Poll showed that only 13 percent of those polled expressed “a great deal of confidence” in the press. (The military topped the list with a 44 percent rating; law firms anchored with bottom with 10 percent.)
A news organization can’t aspire to a 100 percent confidence rating. That’s simply not realistic, said Harvard’s Jones. But, there’s a difference between perceiving a slant in the paper and simply not believing anything it says.
Even people who don’t agree with The Courier-Journal get a lot of their information from the newspaper and use it to draw their own conclusions, Jones said.
That rang true to me. The people who call my office to complain bitterly about bias are generally very well versed in what the newspaper has said.
I wish I worked for a perfect paper. Since I don’t, I’m glad readers can still read it and think for themselves.
I hope they vote, too.
