Unfair and imbalanced?

Fametracker is a site devoted to demotic pop-culture analysis. The featured essays and comedy bits are often hysterically funny, if you pay attention to the entertainment industry even a little. Their forums often direct a stream of invective against the fraudulence of our cultural icons, and so they are a refreshing departure from the usual butt-kissing-party you see in People magazine. A recent forum topic tackled the subject of Fox News and right-wing bias. Most of the people posting to the forum agreed that it skewed the news and it was awful; I took the opportunity to discuss liberal bias and the mainstream news industry’s freakish death wish.
[Another forum participant asked:] Exactly how the hell is network news “liberal biased?” My answer:
1. The selection of news stories. Here’s one example: self-identified homosexuals make up about 3% of the population. Something like 30-40% of the American population go to a place of worship once a week; a similar proportion goes at least occasionally. Yet the number of stories about homosexuals is far higher than for religious topics.
2. The people who make the news. The journalists comprising the upper tier of the profession (at big-city newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, and television networks) are about as liberal as any identifiable segment of the population. (sources) Throughout the industry in general, journalists are twice as likely to call themselves Democrats as Republicans, though that percentage has decreased in the last decade (as it has in the population as a whole). A person’s worldview affects what one considers important; it is naive to think that it wouldn’t affect the selection of news….

3. Identification of politicians and political groups. The ACLU and the NAACP are rarely called “liberal” or “left-wing”; the NRA and the Southern Baptist Convention are routinely called “conservative” or “right-wing.”
4. Cultural differences. Journalists think journalism is like practicing medicine, only much more selfless. They occupy a higher ontological plane than most humans, yet they earn less than the guy who fixes their car. Therefore, they cultivate opinions that are in line with “elite” opinion. NASCAR is a much bigger sport than women’s basketball, yet you’d never know that from watching national news broadcasts.
There’s a lot going on in America that you’d miss by watching the homogenized national news broadcasts. It’s similar to what happened when they started installing Soundscan systems in music stores. Previously, Billboard magazine compiled its charts by using the playlists from radio stations, which were mostly reliable, and the sales tallies that record companies submitted. When Soundscan provided a more-or-less exact way to measure sales, by tracking actual sales at actual registers, it showed that country, classical, and jazz were a lot more popular than had been previously thought. The companies were overstating pop music’s totals because they had invested tons of money in marketing those artists.
Fox News, like conservative talk radio, blogs, magazines, Web sites, etc., is an attempt to fill an underexploited niche in the news market. Big media companies, like the big record companies, have found out that they have flooded the market for certain kinds of news but aren’t serving large portions of their potential audience.
Don’t believe me? Well, Fox is the most popular cable news network in America. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are the most popular talk radio hosts. National Review is the best-selling political magazine in America.
The music labels responded to the Soundscan crisis by calling its numbers into question. That didn’t work, since the totals derived from an unassailable method. So they swallowed their pride and started developing artists who would capitalize on this newfound knowledge. That’s how you got the Country Music Axis of Evil: Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks, the latter-day Garth Brooks, etc., who sounded “country” but denatured their content to reach a wider audience. (That’s another topic.)
The big news companies also questioned the popularity of talk radio in the early ’90s. But instead of banging their heads against the table in frustration, then coolly accepting that they needed to find some new conservative talent, they decided it was their audience that was the problem. It was “angry white males” who drove this rebellion against their orthodoxies. (Remember, journalists think of their work as priestcraft, not as a mere profession.) Or it was that people were stupider — less willing to pay attention to important events, more concerned with their petty little lives.
So what’s happened to the popularity of newsweeklies? Full-service newspapers? CNN? Down, down, and down. There’s no evidence that public appetite for news has declined; there is plenty of evidence that the appetite for left-of-center, elite-handpicked news has declined markedly.
As for the question of whether Fox is “propaganda,” I think the answer is a tentative “No.” I don’t think it was created to spread the American conservative viewpoint — and that is the plain meaning of the word “propaganda.” Undeniably, some of the people on the network are intent on propagating conservatism. However, the network isn’t underwritten by foundations or wealthy donors, it survives by paid advertising. If its ad revenue dries up, you can count on it disappearing, propaganda or not. It’s a business venture, and anyone who doubts that Rupert Murdoch is all about business should read about his shameful dealings with the Chinese government.
I wouldn’t worry about one cable news network. If they want to stay competitive, news organizations should drop their pretenses and admit that there is no such thing as an “objective” perspective on human events. Until the media giants learn to embrace NASCAR fans and Evangelical Christians (I am neither one, by the way), they’ll keep losing their audience.