Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site harvard.ARPA
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!matthews
From: matthews@harvard.ARPA (Jim Matthews)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Mr. Sevener's mythical media bias (second try)
Message-ID: <424@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 5-Mar-85 19:23:01 EST
Article-I.D.: harvard.424
Posted: Tue Mar  5 19:23:01 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 8-Mar-85 02:46:17 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard
Lines: 56


	Mr. Sevener's arguments to prove the existence of a conservative
media bias continue to miss the mark.  By concentrating exclusively on
the mass of small-town newpapers, and endorsements made  by their
ownership, he misses the most fertile areas for bias.  In particular, 
he distorts several critical issues:

News vs. Editorial
	Endorsements are the most explicitly subjective statements that
a publication makes, and for that reason I'm not sure they *can* be biased.
News, however, carries the burden of being free of opinion, and thus any
injection of ideology is a matter of concern.  But news is largely mono-
polized by the national news organizations, a group Mr. Sevener grants to
be liberally inclined.  My hometown paper, in Moses Lake, Washington, doesn't
have reporters in Moscow or Pretoria, so it picks up stories from the
N.Y. Times and runs them.  This makes the circulation figures cited by
Mr. Sevener meaningless -- the various news services reach farther than their
own editorial pages.  And, I would argue, they are more significant.

Newspapers vs. TV
	In several postings on this subject, Mr. Sevener has never touched
on the subject of TV networks, and with good reason.  They are uniformly
liberal, by their own admission (this past election night a CBS commentator
informed us that the American people were "making a mistake"!!! Just voting 
isn't enough--we must vote correctly!)  And they have far more influence than
the hometown paper.  When the choice is between a page and half of clipped
articles from news services, (and that's often all the national news a small
paper will run) and Dan Rather in full color, it's no surprise that people
go to the latter for news.  As above, the local tv stations have little say,
since they just relay clips from the networks.

Management vs. Reporters
	In Sevener's eyes, the media is twisted by a bunch of conservative
newspaper owners.  In the first place, I'm not sure that owners are that 
conservative.  To say they are on the basis of their position is a pitiful
piece of pseudo-Marxist analysis, and totally unsubstatiated by evidence.
And for every anecdote you have about the former chairman of Time, 
Harry Luce, there's another one about the Post's liberal owner Katharine
Graham or her sidekick Benjamin Bradlee.  Furthermore, I would contend
that owners don't have the influence of the liberal reporter corp.  They
can't deal with every piece that goes out, and they concentrate their 
influence on the op-ed page.  Every news story, however, comes through the
eyes of a reporter, who, 80% or more of the time, is a veteran McGovern
supporter.  I don't see how the most conservative owner could even neutralize
this leaning, much less turn it conservative.

Where's the center?
	Finally, the whole question of bias necessitates picking a center
of political belief and condemning anything that deviates.  Mr. Sevener
identifies as "conservative" the fact that the Times runs articles on
Afghanistan.  As if *not* running such articles is "middle-of-the-road"!!
Maybe the media is conservative when seen from Mr. Sevener's vantage point,
but that still leaves it to the left of most of the country.

Jim Matthews
matthews@harvard