Jerry Kilgore has opened up a can of worms, accusing the “liberal press” of “defending a liberal soulmate” — Democrat Tim Kaine — from criticism of his opposition to the death penalty. (See Jeff Schapiro’s article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.)
I have two reactions. First, so what else is new? Second, that’s the way it is, quit whining and get over it.
Of course the Mainstream Media is biased. The only people who can’t see it are those who share the same mental framework for viewing the world as the journalists themselves. To liberals, reportorial coverage just looks normal. The rest of us can see the bias plainly. How do we know? Because we live in daily stupefaction at the spin put on the nightly news and front pages of the leading newspapers. We know there’s bias because we know that we’d write the same stories very differently, ignore stories that get replayed incessantly, and give greater weight to stories that the MSM doesn’t bother to cover.
The fact of bias in the national media is so blindingly obvious that I won’t bother to defend my statement any further. If you can’t see it, I’ll never convince you. It’s a conservative thing, you wouldn’t understand.
On the other hand, I would argue that local reporters tend to be less biased than their national counterparts. Yes, biases exist, but they’re not nearly as intrusive. While the national MSM, cloistered in liberal enclaves like Manhattan and Washington, D.C., ignores vast bodies of evidence that contradict its worldview, local journalists live amidst the mainstream culture, not in isolation from it. That tends to moderate their views. Furthermore, most local reporters, I’ve found, are fairly diligent about reporting both sides of a story. You might have to read a little deeper to read the pro-death penalty quotes, but they’ll be there in the article. There may be subtle bias in the way reporters write the leads and slant the story, but, honestly — and I can say this because I’m very sensitive to it — it’s not nearly as egregious as with the national media.
The true failing of local media, to my mind, is the superficiality of coverage, particularly of public policy issues. Political reporters are, by nature, generalists. They cannot become experts in every field of policy — taxes, budgets, transportation, health care, education, etc. So, they tend to engage in he said/she said reporting without making any great effort the claims being made. Regarding the death penalty debate, why isn’t the T-D’s Frank Green, who has won numerous national awards for his reporting on the death penalty, part of the team covering the debate? Why leave the issue to the generalists?
Kilgore is unhappy because his death penalty initiative isn’t giving him the traction he was looking for. But he shouldn’t blame the media. It’s like Democrats kvetching that Republicans raise more money. As Tom Silvestri, my old boss and now publisher of the Times-Dispatch, used to say about some intractable problem: “It is how it is.” The sub-text of his message was, you can pout about it, or you can work around it. A biased media is part of the background of any political campaign.
Reporters, no matter how liberal, are drawn to many elements of a story. They like conflict. They like human interest. And, yes, they strive to uphold a standard of objectivity and fairness in their coverage. They often fall short of that standard, but the existence of the standard does moderate their biases. Finally, I would add, the local MSM is not monolithic. Blogs provide a limited corrective. So does local talk radio.
Ultimately, the existence of a biased media puts the onus on the Kilgore campaign to craft and deliver its campaign messages in such a way as to penetrate the filters of the MSM. Jim Gilmore succeeded eight years ago, and George Allen did four years before him. It can be done.
