MSNBC’s Chris Hayes conceded this week that the press is biased, but insisted it’s not partisan.
His remarks came Wednesday as he was being interviewed on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.”
The show’s host asked Hayes to comment on the most recent GOP primary debate, which took place Tuesday evening and was hosted by the Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal.
“The accusations that the mainstream media is pro-Democrat, anti-Republican is one that is being, you know, I guess thrown out by the GOP right now. You are part of that machine. You are the mainstream media. Is that how it works? Is the mainstream media Democrat all the time and are they anti-Republican?” Noah asked, making sure to use air quotes when referring to the “mainstream media.”
“I’m part of the mainstream media, but my viewpoint is pretty clear,” Hayes responded. “I think what people don’t like is when they feel that there are biases at work that are unannounced. And I think the mainstream media is biased but not in any partisan way. I think there are certain biases we have.”
“We have bias towards spectacle. We have bias towards someone just blew something up. Let’s go cover that. One hundred thousand people marched for something somewhere else. I don’t know if that’s good television, right?” he asked. “So there is all kind of biases that end up having different expressions along the political spectrum but mostly they’re biases of the form of television.”
Noah then pushed Hayes to answer the question of who he thinks should be dropped form the next GOP debate.
The MSNBC host responded, saying, “Here is what I would say. The United States has never, with the exception of two generals, has never, Grant and Eisenhower, as far as I can tell, I think, has never elected anyone with as little political experience as Donald Trump and Ben Carson currently have and I think there is a reason for that.”
“I mean – you know, look, Ben Carson is a manifestly accomplished, smart guy, right? But in the same way I think Bernie Sanders is a smart guy. I don’t want him to operate on my brain tomorrow.
Noah added, “That didn’t sound biased at all.”
Earlier this year, the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney offered a countering view, arguing at length that media bias is indeed real, that it leans left and that it does color the press’ coverage of certain events.
“It is almost incomprehensible to me and other conservatives that some in the media deny that there is a strong liberal bias in the mainstream media,” he wrote.
“The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — the largest media outlets with the exception of Fox News — all slant clearly left,” he added, citing specific media figures, including CNN’s Chris Cuomo, as examples of biased reporters.
He suggested that biased coverage itself isn’t deliberate, and that it doesn’t necessarily involve “collusion, deception, or bad intentions,” but it’s an undeniable fact that there are many journalists whose “personal views are significantly to the Left of the American political center.
As a result, he wrote, “this ends up slanting their coverage.”
(h/t NewsBusters)
