Jack Shafer

Last week, the hall monitors who run Gannett’s 11 newspapers in Wisconsin brought the mean end of the ruler down on the wrists of 25 journalists for signing petitions to recall Governor Scott Walker.

Kevin Corrado, publisher of the chain’s Green Bay Press-Gazette, spoke the company line in a Mar. 24 column in which he stated that signing the petition constituted a “breach of Gannett’s principles of ethical conduct.” Promising “disciplinary measures” and additional “ethics training” for the signatories, Corrado continued:

A number of the journalists told their editors that they did not consider signing the petition a political act. They equated it to casting a ballot in an election. But we do not make that distinction.

According to Corrado, the Gannett 25 violated six of the 32 principles of ethical conduct in the company code of ethics, even though none of the busted journalists were covering politics. (It appears that the journalists were swept up in a dragnet that Gannett investigative reporters knit to capture the circuit court judges who signed petitions, not journalists. They bagged 29 judges, 12 percent of the state’s county-level judiciary.)

The jurist in me thinks that the Gannett 25 could easily beat the charges – which vary from not being impartial to being prey to potential conflicts of interest – in traffic court. To begin with, voting for a candidate – a grossly political act by any measure – displays much more partiality than signing a petition calling for a new election. When you vote, you declare for one candidate over the others. But signing a recall petition makes a more subtle statement, something along the lines of: “How about a do-over of the election?” If it’s all right for journalists to vote, surely it should be all right for journalists to express their view that there should be a new vote. The quantity of activism here is almost unmeasurable!

I suspect that what really irritates the Gannett bosses is not the deed but the visibility of the deed. Petition signatures are open to public examination, therefore discoverable by those looking to expose potential “bias” in news coverage. The content of votes, on the other hand, are secret and therefore invisible to aspiring media-bias busters. If votes were made public, news organizations would have to prohibit their staffers from voting if they wanted to be consistent. (Luckily, under current law, you can’t be barred from voting.)

So the ethical crime in Wisconsin wasn’t having political views, which the Gannett code allows. It wasn’t expressing those views in secret. It was expressing a weakened form of them in a way that could go public. As long as you conceal your views from the ethics cops, you’re safe.

Gannett’s ethics code is pretty standard, paralleling those erected at Reuters, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. So in giving Gannett a whack of my forehand,  I extend my backhand to all. The primary purpose of the codes isn’t to improve journalism but to simplify the job of policing journalists. It’s easier to hand down to the newsroom 32 commandments that govern behavior, as Gannett does, and then ship violators out for punishment and reeducation, than to examine their work for journalistic quality.

That journalists hold political views and act on them should surprise nobody. Are not they human beings? Back in the early 1990s while editing Washington City Paper, I tested this thesis by having a reporter check the voter registration information of 40 Washington Post reporters and editors I considered the paper’s best and most influential. By an overwhelming margin, they were registered Democratic. One columnist who registered Republican offered this excuse for his outlier status: He and his wife wanted to make sure they got on all the political mailing lists so they could see all the campaign literature. Each year they flipped a coin to determine who registered Democratic and who registered Republican. He had lost that year’s toss.

In a just and utopian world, news organizations would permit modest political activism by journalists – campaign contributions, placards on their lawns, bumper stickers on their cars, attendance at rallies, even the signing of recall petitions, etc. – as long as the journalists were willing to declare it. This proposal isn’t as radical as it sounds. At the core of the current journalistic codes is the notion that judging journalism requires us to judge the conduct of the journalists producing it. Instead of suppressing the political lives of journalists, why not allow that which is now covert to become overt and give readers more information to assess coverage?

Free the Gannett 25!

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It should go without saying that, as usual, I speak for myself here and not my current bosses. Speak for yourself with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I speak pure heresy on my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: A cameraman films a cell at the Noroeste high-security prison in El Rincon in the state of Nayarit, Mexico, February 28, 2012. REUTERS/Bernardo Montoya

As long as the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press continues to insist on conducting opinion polls about “trust” and the media, I’ll continue to insist on writing columns like this one.

I’m not knocking Pew. As collators of public opinion go, it’s not a bad organization. But you’ve really got to break the spines on Pew’s trust-in-the-media reports to glean the higher truths about how the public really feels about journalists and journalism.

Pew’s latest survey, released this week, reports that negative opinions about news organization performance have reached new highs, based on many of the measures it has tracked since 1985.

More respondents than ever believe that overall, media stories are often inaccurate (66 percent), news organizations unfairly tend to favor one side (77 percent), and news outlets are often influenced by powerful people and organizations (80 percent). (See the chart from Pew.)

Pew’s respondents are far from being connoisseurs of news. Instead, they appear to be slaves to their televisions, with 66 percent of them claiming to get most of their news from TV. Now, I’ve got nothing against television. I own two and keep one in my office. They are wonderful devices. But as dispensers of news, they’re not sufficient to the task.

Let’s say you get your world and national news from ABC’s, NBC’s, or CBS’s half-hour nightly newscasts, each of which is still more popular than anything on cable. Let’s say you watch every night. More nourishing on one level than the politics/current event shows featured on cable, the nightly broadcasts are still a stingy news meal. As Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report points out, the news hole for a 30 minute newscast is between 18 and 19 minutes after you delete commercials, “openings, closings, teases, promos and logos.” After you shave the transcript for last night’s CBS Evening News to its essence, you’re swallowing about 3,111 words describing seven main stories.

Even if you’re a slow reader, you can probably read 7,000 to 8,000 words from 15 or 20 newspaper stories in the 30 minutes it takes a nightly newscast to unwind. Unless there is remarkable video or superb drama in the telecast, there’s no way that TV’s nightly news can deliver as much information as a newspaper in the same time. A TV viewer is, by definition, news challenged compared to a newspaper reader. He may absorb a lot of headlines by watching the news ticker at the bottom of the screen or by channel surfing, but it’s an exercise in wading in the shallows. If you’re one of the respondents who gets most of your news from television, then I’m going to assign you two hours of TV news a day, including blocks from BBC and PBS telecasts, before I let you into my news clubhouse.

The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs. When Pew respondents say (over time) that news is increasingly inaccurate, increasingly one-sided, and more than ever is influenced by the powerful, they’re mostly telling us about the television news they watch, right?

One way to understand the increase in negative opinions about the press is to go back to 1985, when Pew started these surveys. Back then, there was no Fox News Channel and no MSNBC. Cable penetration was only about 42 percent of households, with only a smattering of satellite viewers. Today, more than 90 percent of households subscribe to cable or satellite. I reckon that Pew is actually measuring an increase in TV news consumption—probably of the cable variety—and less a decline in underlying media trustworthiness.

Not that the media should be trusted. Remain wary of all institutions of power at all times is my advice, advice that Pew’s respondents seem to live by. They don’t seem to trust anybody. They have less “trust” for government—state, federal, the Obama administration, and Congress (all measured separately)—than they do for national news organizations.

Where does government/media distrust come from? Some is organic, rising naturally from the soil. Some is encouraged by politicians following in the footsteps of such strategic haters as George Wallace and Richard Nixon. And some of it is piped in by news outlets like Fox, which coaches its viewers to distrust other media for commercial reasons. As a professional skeptic, I approve of all distrust, even if the underlying goal is to win political office or turn a media buck. From doubt comes knowledge.

But Pew’s respondents are not my sort of doubters, if only because they don’t have the courage of their convictions. Having trashed the press in general, they rate the trustworthiness of local news very high, with 69 percent saying they trust it a lot or some. And when asked to rate their main sources news—TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, website or app—62 percent of respondents say their main sources get the facts right.

This is the Big Mac eater’s way of saying, “I like the burgers that I like.”

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Back in my Slate days (was it really that long ago?), I declared my lack of trust in Pew respondents and in Mr. Trust himself, Walter Cronkite. Earlier this week, I chatted about trust with Craig Silverman and Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter. Send your trusting correspondence to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and subscribe to America’s most trustworthy Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A KNBC-TV news van nears the main entrance to the NBC television network studios in Burbank, California, October 11, 2007. REUTERS/Fred Prouser

By Jack Shafer
The views expressed are his own.

Before we go any further on the topic, may we first please thank the gods for media bias?

If not for media bias, I’m certain that my news diet would taste so strongly of sawdust and talc that I would abandon news consumption completely. As long as I’m eating news, give me the saffron smoothness of New York Times liberalism and the hallelujah hot sauce excitement of Fox News Channel conservatism. Anything but a menu of balance, moderation, and fairness!

Not that I don’t value balance, moderation, and fairness—a good Associated Press story can nourish the soul as well as a six-pack of Bud on a hot summer day. But as a rule, I like my news chefs to make spicy meals or no meals at all.

My devotion to biased media puts me on the outs with the conservative gang at the Media Research Center, who patrol the nation’s airwaves and news pages for liberal transgressions against the truth, and the liberals at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America, who stalk conservative deviations. Good luck to you all, I say, but leave me off your e-mail lists.

Yet the search for media bias goes on, the latest contribution to the genre being a new book by Tim Groseclose, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Professor Groseclose, who holds positions in both the political science and economics departments at UCLA, has with his colleague Jeff Milyo, devised a new way to measure bias. First, he calculated the “PQs,” or political quotients, of members of Congress “based upon issues chosen by the Americans for Democratic Action.” The closer the member follows the ADA’s liberal line, the higher his score; the less often, the lower. The PQ machine awards Rep.  Maxine Waters, D-Calif., a perfect PQ of 100 and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a PQ of 4.8. Former U.S. senator Arlen Specter scored about 50, making him the archetypal middle-of-the-roader. (I took Groseclose’s 10-item questionnaire and recorded a PQ of 30, but don’t put too much stock in that score. I’m a libertarian, a political persuasion that confounds questionnaires designed to smoke out righties from lefties.)

The two scholars then devised “SQs,” or slant quotients, to measure media bias. The more liberal think tanks a news outlet cited, the greater its SQ. The New York Times came in at 73.7 out of 100 for perfectly liberal and the Washington Times scored 35.4. By juxtaposing PQs and SQs, Groseclose attempts to demonstrate how far the press diverges from what America thinks.

I won’t bother to argue with Groseclose whether the New York Times is more liberal than the Washington Times. Neither would former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent. The average reader who seeks the New York Times isn’t looking for a “normal” publication that cites liberal, centrist, and conservative think tanks in equal portions. He’s likely looking for a publication that ranks his Manhattan-state-of-mind as normal—that is pro-gay marriage, pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-regulation, and so on. This reader won’t throw his newspaper to the dirt in disgust if an article mentions the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, but he’s not going to tolerate a newspaper that acts like a debate society, giving equal time to all points of view in pursuit of a SQ score of 50. The same is true for your average Washington Times reader or Fox News Channel viewer, who would rather be accused of soliciting confirmation bias from their news sources than be forced to watch PBS’s NewsHour, which records a predictable middle-of-the-road SQ of 55.8.

I admire Groseclose’s effort to quantify bias, and I found enlightenment in his chapter-long studies of press coverage of tax cuts, “partial-birth abortion,” Hurricane Katrina, and the role of race in UCLA admissions. So, I will also keep his book on my shelf for future consultation. But here’s the “but”: Left Turn‘s worshipful normalization of the centrist point of view prevents it from rethinking the media bias question. As the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have been shouting for 20 years, centrism is just as much an ideology as leftism or rightism. The “truth” does not necessarily reside in the center: A centrist is potentially as biased as any lefty or righty. Or to put it in the Texas pejorative, as Jim Hightower does in a book of the same name, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

Rather than ripping news outlets for “slanting” the news—as Groseclose and the other bias-hunters do—I prefer to blame news consumers for journalism’s deficiencies: Readers and viewers aren’t as critical about their favorite news outlets as they should be, except to complain that the New York Times isn’t as liberal as it should be or that Fox has failed to terminate the career of Barney Frank. My cure for this kind of credulousness is simple: Have readers and viewers expand the range of news sources they consume, embracing the whole SQ spectrum from liberal to centrist to conservative to “off the wing.”

The recommendation comes from my prejudice that liberals are better at sniffing out corporate corruption and national security shenanigans and conservatives better at blowing the whistle on waste and overreach by governments. Centrist news outlets, or at least self-defined centrist journalists, don’t strike me as possessed or deranged enough to battle their way to the end of a good investigation.

I also call upon readers to learn how to hit both lefties and righties—and whatever ambidextrous centrist journalists take the mound. Media bias isn’t a journalistic problem. It’s a solution.

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In addition to four daily newspapers, I read the Weekly Standard, the Nation, the National Review, the American Prospect, Reason, the New York Review of Books, Mother Jones, Commentary, Harper’s, the New Republic, the American Spectator, and more. My RSS reader similarly overflows. What else should I be reading? Drop recommendations to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and follow my Twitter feed, where I suggest worthy articles frequently. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: Members of Color of Change protest against Fox News Channel outside the News Corporation building in New York July 23, 2008. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid