Serious praise should go to the famously brave CBS reporter, Lara Logan, for telling the truth in a recent interview, in saying that the media both nationally and internationally is hideously biased leftward.
“The media everywhere is mostly liberal,” Logan told podcaster Mike Ritland, citing her 30 years in professional journalism. “In this country, 85 percent of journalists are registered Democrats …. I always joke that another 14 percent were too lazy to register, and that there’s maybe one percent that is on the Right.”
She continued: “Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right? All of them. And that’s a problem for me.”
The bias is nothing new, Logan said, but the standards of professionalism have dropped precipitously:
“Although the media has always been historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today … That means we’ve become political activists in a sense and, some could argue, propagandists — and there’s some merit to that.”
Logan elaborated on these points at considerable length, and with considerable thoughtfulness and insight, even while acknowledging that being so forthright might be “professional suicide for me.”
This is important. Journalists on the Right surely can all tell of conversations with supposedly mainstream or “establishment” media figures who admit a liberal bias in the profession, but who say it is benign. The establishmentarian will say something along the lines of, “well, journalism just attracts people who care about fairness and social justice and who are compassionate, whereas conservatives care more about making money. But because we [the liberals] are committed to the truth, that means we’re fair to everybody.”
Note the assumptions that liberals are morally superior and conservatives are greedy. Well, when that is your bias going in, how can you possibly be fair to conservatives, whom you think are your moral inferiors? The bias itself blinds those establishmentarians to the harmful effects their bias produces.
Case in point: The Feb. 17 New York Times “news” article headlined — I’m not kidding — “Republicans hope to sway voters with labels that demonize Democrats.” Seriously.
Question: In the past 60 years, has the Times ever run a piece whose theme is that Democrats are trying to “demonize” the poor, victimized Republicans?
By this telling, Republicans are “unusually aggressive … meant to strangle … mischaracterize legislation backed by Democrats… caricaturing [Speaker Nancy Pelosi].” Meanwhile, the poor abused Democrats, apparently correctly (according to the tone of the piece), “see an insidious effort to use women and minorities, especially women of color, as the new symbols of the radical ‘other.’”
And so on, and on, and on, and on. Democrats are saints. When they push socialism, anti-Semitism, and abortion up to the moment of birth, they are merely misunderstood. Republicans, however, are evil, attempting to demonize and “other-ize” them.
If you missed that subtext, context, and conclusion in this “news” article, then you can’t read.
Lara Logan is correct, and the media outlets who pretend she’s wrong are either dishonest or hypocritical or both. And if this little column is “demonizing” the establishment media…well, so be it. Some demons are real.
