The endemic bias in our institutions of information, education, and entertainment is not news

Lying About Bias

By Bruce Walker
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Ask almost any conservative who the real political enemy of American values is and he will likely say the media. The nearly hysterical reaction of the leftist establishment media to talk radio and to Fox News shows just how desperately the left is to keep every public voice except its own silent. This ripples across the whole spectrum of expression. Entertainment programs like CSI spout an overtly leftist agenda. College students are bullied into not using academic freedom to support conservative values. Even young school children are taught to sing praises to our Leader, Obama.

The endemic bias in our institutions of information, education, and entertainment is not news. It is not a calamity for freedom and democracy either. The real problem is that the left, with a perfectly straight face, lies about its biases. Evidence of the clear bias of television news has been accumulating for forty years, since Vice President Agnew’s Des Moines speech. Poll and poll, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, show that those who define and report news, who develop and administer the studies of our students, and who create and perform entertainment on television and in film are overwhelming leftist. Polls also show that Americans are overwhelmingly non-leftist. Is that a danger to democracy?

The bias, per se, is not a danger to democracy. The majority of Americans can find information easily on the internet and the unrealistic dogma taught our children in classrooms fades fast in the real world of family, work, and community. The dangers – and they are very real dangers – of leftist institutional bias are these: (1) The leftist establishment acts like subsidiaries of Standard Oil and does not compete against itself, and (2) The leftist establishment lies about its bias.

Americans have long recognized that the best guard against an accumulation of private power is real competition. If Ford makes a better truck than GM, it points out to its potential customers all the ways in which its truck is better than GM. This sort of competition is conspicuous by its absence in television and in film. The outstanding failure of CBS News to cover the Tea Party protests, for example, should have been big story to all the other networks – if all the networks were truly in competition. The short shrift given the ACORN scandals by MSNBC should have been exposed by the other news networks, if these news networks were real, rather than phony, rivals. Instead all the leftist establishment media acts like a single, monopolistic conspiracy, concealing the true flaws of its notional “rivals.â€