The Way It Will Be

Well, I finally read the CBS Report. Eh.

Feel free to read it if you like. I'll say only this much about it -- it lays out plenty of facts and shows that the panel did a solid job of investigating this mess. Solid, not spectacular, because there are a number of factual questions that need follow-up, although that would likely be true in any case. Unfortunately, the report also refuses to draw firm conclusions that one could or would normally reach after a review of the facts. As a lawyer, it reminds me of a summer associate memo -- we have to make sure that we put forth both positions on the issue, because we're afraid of being wrong (in fact, I was once a summer associate at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the firm that produced the report. Good firm, great people, including Dick Thornburgh). A friend and I used to joke that the ending to a perfect summer associate memo would be something like "One thing is for certain -- if things don't stay the same, they're bound to get better or worse."

In this instance, I don't think the panel was afraid to draw some conclusions, but it definitely avoided them -- namely, it avoided the conclusion that CBS exhibited bias. As Leslie Moonves' statement for CBS noted:

We are also gratified that the Panel, after extensive analysis and consideration, has found that, while CBS News made numerous errors of judgment and execution in this story, these mistakes were not motivated by any political agenda. As the Report states, "The Panel does not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias."

Now that's a strong statement to make after concluding that everyone involved in the story rushed to put the story on the air. The working theory in the media is that that CBS wanted to beat the competition to the story. Again, the credibility of this statement is somewhat questionable. This story had dangled from the hook for years, and had been investigated to hell and back. After all, Bush had won two elections in Texas and won the Presidency of the United States in 2000, yet these some documents had never surfaced before? No one at CBS bothered to ask that question of Mary Mapes or anyone else, yet it's easily the most obvious question that should occur to any unbiased observer. You know, the same sorts of questions CBS and every other mainstream media outlet asked about the Swift Boat Veterans (the answers to the questions were so unsatisfactory that these outlets refused to run the story until the Kerry campaign attacked the Swifties).

There are, of course, other unanswered questions. We still have no idea who forged the memos -- it could be Bill Burkett, it could be someone who gave it to him. And we still need someone to find out how the Democratic National Committee's "Fortunate Son" ad campaign against Bush was scheduled to start just a few days after the report aired.

But these questions will likely go unanswered, because the media doesn't want to draw attention to the crap behind the curtain. It's bad enough that CBS screwed up this badly, but the majority of the mainstream media is now working in a mode where it protects its own integrity after allowing CBS to throw four unlucky souls under the bus. But this event is only the latest manifestation of the media opting to refuse to deal with its biggest problem -- the liberal media bias that dominates their business, and continues to destroy their credibility.

Bernard Goldberg, who's managed to write two best-sellers about the bias in his business, has always put forth the idea that there's no conspiracy in the media, just something similar to groupthink. The mainstream media believes that the liberal position is reasonable and middle-of-the-road, because that's where they, the media, stand. In this sense, it's almost impossible for a journalist to report the news objectively, becuase their inherent bias creeps into their reporting.

But even Goldberg admits that the analogy only goes so far. As he noted in Arrogance, the media reporting on a January 16, 2002 incident at Appalachian School of Law in Virginia clearly demonstrated the media's anti-gun bias. Goldberg recounted the tale as told by most media organizations -- a failing student goes on a shooting rampage with a handgun, killing a dean, a professor and another student (and wounding three other students) before being tackled and subdued by three other students.

Great story, right? Except for the fact that the great majority of news stories (over 90%, by every count including Goldberg's) omitted the fact that two of the students who had purportedly tackled and subdued the gunmen had first raced to their cars and grabbed their own handguns.

As Goldberg noted, there are disputes as to whether the handguns really had an impact on the capture of the gunmen. But failing to report this fact, for whatever reason, is ridiculous. And it's typical of the media. There's more at work there than unconcious bias -- that's the media elite trying to portray the story in a light that's favorable to its agenda.

The problem for the media is the failure to acknowledge that they have become a mouthpiece for advocacy. A few folks are finally stating it. Howard Fineman of Newsweek penned a story where he declared the death of the so-called "American Mainstream Media Party" (AMMP). Fineman stated, quite simply, that the concept of a non-partisan media is long dead, at least in the view of the public at large. He feels it's a loss, although I disagree. But the interesting note is where he thinks the media began taking positions...

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things. The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

Fineman is partially right and partially wrong. He's right on the facts, with a caveat -- one that's all my opinion. I think the media probably began taking positions on issues before Vietnam, but something changed with Vietnam. Before, the media reported on the issues and expressed viewpoints, but there wasn't a presumotion -- an arrogance -- that they held the reasonable point of view on an issue, and that the other side's point of view, while it needed to be represented, also need to be portrayed in the proper light -- as extreme or just flat-out wrong.

Keep in mind, the media and the country were involved in watching the death of Jim Crow laws in the South and advances in civil rights where the good guys, like Martin Luther King, truly were on the side of the angels. And they walked into a situtation in Vietnam where the U.S. government's policy seemed heavy-handed and wrong. Tack on Watergate, and the media now believed that their deeply held beliefs were being vindicated. Even more, the media began to feel as if it was not only the reporter of the disputes, but also the true representative of the American people.

But that's where the media went wrong. Look, the "Mainstream Media" (MSM) never represented, nor does it represent, mainstream America. The mainstream in Fineman's AMMP represented the mainstream thought in the media, not in America. The MSM could not figure out why the American people voted for Ronald Reagan. The MSM could not understand why Bush beat Dukakis. The MSM cannot understand why the majority of the American people approve of the death penalty, supported welfare reform, disapprove of affirmative action quotas, like owning guns, disapprove of gay marriage and why so many Americans go to church every Sunday -- they perceive all these things as true, but they can't understand them. There is a tendency to try to influence these views by putting forth their own as the better point of view while ignoring the other side (concious media bias) and there's a failure to see the other side because the media elite live in an echo chamber (unconscious media bias). Both types of bias are a problem.

In the end, I think Fineman's wrong on one point. The death of the so-called AMMP is a good thing, not a bad one. Yes, America may have trusted Walter Cronkite like no other man in America, but should America have trusted him? In the end, we now have news coming at us from countless outlets, and some people decry the bias inherent in these outlets. What they fail to realize is that it's difficult to erase bias from the media, and it's better to promote the free exchange of information.

Yes, there are plenty of people who accept the words of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity as gospel. But there are plenty of folks who feel the same way about Carville and Begala on Crossfire, or so-called neutral outlets like Jennings and Rather. The difference is that conservatives now have their own arena in pop culture where their beliefs are being expressed. They don't have to live within the liberal echo chamber all the time. Don't get me wrong --popular culture is still dominated by the liberal point of view. It is very hard, if not impossible, for a conservative to ignore the liberal point of view. I'd say the converse is much easier for liberals.

People will become better informed with more information. Yes, some of it is crap -- but some of it has always been, and always will be, crap. But that's the price of free speech in our society. And we have to trust the consumer to be able to pick out the nuggets of truth, or at least the credible information, from the drek.

In the end, people will only continue to accept news and information form a source if they find it trustworthy, because that's the nature of the free-market exchange of information. Selling out that trust for the sake of your political view, as the left-wing dishrag and CBS are learning, will make people less likely to trust you as either a reporter or an advocate. And there are conservatives who have learned the same lesson, although it's a little less of a story -- after all, they haven't been the mainstream media in this country for the last thirty-plus years.

In the end, it's media arrogance that is now being exposed by the alternative media, especially bloggers. Last week, Opinion Journal noted, on January 13th and 14th, that bloggers had torn apart Nick Kristof's ridiculous column comparing U.S. infant mortality to that of Cuba and China. Kristof missed several key facts and misrepresented others. Do you think that such a truth would ever reach a wider audience in the days before talk radio, Fox News and the Internet? What about the Sarah Boxer story in the left-wing dishrag from earlier this week on the Iraq the Model bloggers? Would anyone have reached the rest of the world with a story that portrayed the other side in that debate?

The MSM is right to feel as if it's credibility is under attack. What they need to realize is that there's a reason -- it's their own fault. And that, as Cronkite would never say, is just the way it is.