Twitter has made liberal media bias more overt — and that’s a good thing

Some conservatives complained that it was unethical for somebody with stated public opposition to Kavanaugh to write a story that attempts to portray him in a bad light. I disagree. I think it’s perfectly appropriate for her to have written the story, which should be praised or mocked on its own merits, and I’m glad that Twitter exists so that there’s more transparency to the liberal bias in the media. Would conservatives have preferred to live in an era in which Bazelon’s personal opinions would have been unknown? In which she keeps them to herself and insists publicly that she has no sort of ideological bias? Or in which the Times assigns the piece to some other reporter who may be equally liberal but who has been more quiet about it? I know I wouldn’t.

[More: Undaunted by ice-throwing story, Mitch McConnell vows to vote on Brett Kavanaugh ‘this week’]

Having reported in the pre-Twitter era, I’m familiar with how things used to work. Members of the media would spout off about objectivity when speaking publicly, yet they’d regularly speak among themselves and develop certain narratives that more often than not reinforced the liberal agenda — in down times before campaign rallies, or press conferences, or stakeouts, or at the bars. I went to Columbia Journalism School and and remember quite vividly how the next generation of journalists was distraught on election night 2000 when Florida was taken off the board for Al Gore.

Now, thanks to Twitter, none of this is hidden. We see all the snark and narrative building happen in real time, and can see how closely the tweets of reporters parallel Democratic talking points for the day. Democrats have lately decided to focus on Kavanaugh’s history of drinking in high school and college, and voila, we suddenly get an avalanche of stories that both A) Misrepresent Kavanaugh’s testimony to claim he denied drinking to excess and then B) Write stories debunking that straw man in an effort to make him seem less credible, thus calling into question his categorical denials of sexual assault.

You can see how the narrative spreads here as the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker, normally one of the better reporters, tweets out the Bazelon article while reflexively perpetuating the myth that Kavanaugh denied excessive drinking, then corrects himself:

It’s important to make something clear. I don’t think that just because somebody has an explicit bias, that they can’t write a well-reported story that sheds light on an important issue. If that were the case, I’d be arguing that everybody should dismiss all the reporting I’ve done on healthcare because I have a strong bias in favor of free market solutions and against government control. In reality, I’ve had liberals tell me that my critical reporting on Obamacare has helped shed light on some of its objective weaknesses, and I regularly read pro-Obamacare liberals to get a better understanding of the arguments being made in its favor. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent is overtly liberal, yet I find him invaluable to read to understand Democrats’ thinking because he’s well sourced. There are a lot of issues and arguments raised by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that I would not have thought of myself had I been only reading conservatives.

In the end, I don’t think it’s realistic to think that the media, absent certain exceptions, can be truly objective arbiters of the news. In the very choice of stories, in the decision of who to speak to and what questions to ask and what quotes to use, they are making decisions based on their own biases. Given this, I’d much rather live in a world in which the biases are out in the open than in one in which journalists have biases but sanctimoniously pretend they do not.

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