Joe Scarborough and his fellow “Morning Joe” Republicans, Michael Steele and Nicolle Wallace, mocked The New York Times and The Washington Post Tuesday morning for the low priority they’ve placed upon reporting the IRS scandal. Scarborough sarcastically pored over the morning’s edition of the Times in search of an article on the matter; news that the agency tardily informed Congress of missing emails between former official Lois Lerner and outside administration employees, subsequent news that the crashed hard drive on which these emails were stored had been recycled, and the fallout, including House committee hearings and calls for a special prosecutor, have certainly provided plenty of material. Scarborough couldn’t find a story.
But Mika Brzezinski did — on page 19, a place of surefire prominence.
“Look! ‘Examining a Scandal Within a Scandal about Emails at the I.R.S.‘ ”
“A scandal within a scandal? No, it’s just a scandal,” Scarborough said.
He trotted out a typical argument: that if Republican X had been doing what Democrat Y is doing, the Times, the Post, the “mainstream media” would be all over it, but because it’s a Democratic administration under suspicion, the news goes underreported. Fair but familiar, and too specific and accusatory. He called the journalistic negligence a “scam.”
“This is why conservatives don’t trust national newspapers. It’s why they don’t trust broadcast news.”
But there was a pithier point to his argument, one that really gets at the heart of widespread, stealthy media bias.
“It’s not the news that they run … it’s the stories they don’t run. It’s the omissions, the acts of omission when Democrats are in power.”
In other words, news judgment.
That choice — the news that they, the national newspapers and the broadcast networks, decide to “run” and “not run” — is news judgment. It’s a choice of what news to provide their readerships. This is media bias by story selection, not coded language within an article, not an unfavorable headline, not a prominent columnist afforded space on a left-leaning opinion page. It’s the issue that a website like NewsBusters will point out when it observes that a national news network has afforded only so much time to a “scandal” like the one at the IRS. Democrats define such a “scandal” as a non-story by calling it a partisan crusade, driven by conspiracy theorizing. The media does so by simply not reporting about it.
It’s the root of the problem that conservatives criticize. What mix of stories do you expect to read in the news when only 7 percent of journalists identify as Republicans?
The boom of conservative media has been a natural byproduct. It’s why such a subindustry provides alternative takes on national news with such frequency, and unearths stories that other publications have missed — and in the case of the Washington Free Beacon’s recent reporting on Hillary Clinton, for instance, unearths stories that other publications have to report, themselves.
It’s the battle between the 7 percent and the 93 percent, the latter the distinct majority of media that calls itself “Democrat,” “independent,” or “other.” Is the whole of that group, including the “independents” and the “others,” left-leaning in its discretion? Of course not. Are the most prominent elements of it? You be the judge.
After all, the Times‘ own public editor has said the band of journalists that decides “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is defined by a “political and cultural progressivism” that “virtually bleeds through the fabric” of the newspaper.
