Some of The Bee’s politically conservative readers for years have been bugged — no, make that angered — by how the paper does or doesn’t label various people and groups.
There’s the Christian right, those readers note, but never a Christian left. There’s the political far right but never a far left. There’s extreme conservative but never extreme liberal. The only left wing you ever read about is in hockey and soccer stories.
In some of these cases, the complaints have substance. The media (It isn’t just The Bee, mark you!) love labels as they go about their story-telling chores. Labels are convenient shortcuts — but they can also be interpreted as a subtle sign of tilt.
Here’s a recent example from The Bee, and you can judge for yourself.
A front page story two days after the recent election was a follow-up to the passage of the controversial Prop. 209, the battle over affirmative action.
The story told of a group joining Gov. Pete Wilson in court action to help end affirmative action statutes. That group is, as the paper wrote, “the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative, nonprofit advocacy group.”
On the other side, also bringing a court action but to negate Prop. 209, was the American Civil Liberties Union — followed by no similar identification.
And so the calls arrived, asking why the paper didn’t identify the ACLU as a “liberal, nonprofit advocacy group.”
What’s fair is fair, said one reader.
Responding, Rick Rodriguez, Bee managing editor, said he agrees “in general that we don’t describe folks as a ‘liberal nonprofit advocacy group’ or similar phrases as often as we do conservative groups. We’ve improved, but we need to be more consistent.”
But in this case, he argued, the ACLU “is nationally recognized and known. People know it is a liberal-oriented civil liberties group. It’s pretty hard not to know about the ACLU with the high profile and often controversial cases in which the organization has participated.”
By contrast, he said, the Pacific Legal Foundation, “while well established, doesn’t have anywhere near the same name identification….People know the ACLU and its politics; they don’t know the Pacific Legal Foundation.”
I think Rodriguez is right in what he says about how well these two politically oriented groups — the ACLU and the PLF are known.
Granted, this example isn’t the most egregious instance of uneven labeling. But the complaints that arose are another indication of first, how important these seemingly little matters can be to many savvy readers; and, second, how careful media folks need to be, especially given the undeniable liberal bent of the journalism craft.
