Timothy P. Carney writes: The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — the largest media outlets with the exception of Fox News — all slant clearly left. So do a vast majority of other major newspapers and magazines. I’m not talking about their opinion pages, but about their news operations.
I don’t think it’s deliberate, or that any collusion, deception, or bad intentions are at play, except in the rarest circumstances. I also think very highly of many of the journalists whose personal views are significantly to the Left of the American political center. Many of them do an excellent job of reporting the news fairly and trying to understand political viewpoints all around the spectrum.
But the vast majority of journalists at these major outlets are generally liberal, and this ends up slanting their coverage. Cuomo is a perfect example.
Cuomo’s father was Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. His brother is Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is a daytime host and reporter, not an explicitly liberal host, such as Piers Morgan or MSNBC’s evening hosts.
This is the norm in the media: People with distinctively liberal or Democratic pedigrees and resumes are hired as straight news reporters (see Jake Tapper, Nick Confessore, Annie Lowrey, Alex Seitz-Wald, most of whom are excellent and fair journalists). In 2014, the Media Research center counted 30 former reporters as Obama officials. It’s far, far rarer to find the opposite.
While Tapper, Confessore, and Lowrey do a very good job of making sure their coverage is fair, the norm in the major media is slanted coverage — slanted to the Left. For instance, Linda Greenhouse was long the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, and now she’s a liberal columnist about the Supreme Court whose factual errors consistently cut against the Right.
Reporters at the major outlets are almost entirely liberal on cultural issues. See the coverage of the gay marriage ruling, where the Supreme Court stretched the language of the Constitution to find that states couldn’t limit marriage to heterosexual couples. The country seems to be split evenly on gay marriage, but the major media are nearly unanimous. I don’t think this is really a matter of debate. In 2013, the Washington Post’s ombudsman basically admitted as much, with even more revealing comments by anonymous Post reporters placing Christian teaching on marriage on the same level as racism.
You see it with abortion, too, where journalists always ask difficult abortion questions of pro-life politicians, and nearly never ask difficult abortion questions of pro-choice politicians.
But it’s also true on questions of regulation, government spending and taxation. (I should add the media also has a very strong bias, which is neither liberal nor conservative, towards deficit reduction, which most journalists don’t realize is a bias.) I could give a thousand examples, but one good one was from the New York Times reporter, Jonathan Weisman, who spent the most time on the Export-Import Bank at the time, making it clear he was totally unaware about conservatives’ and libertarians’ economic arguments against export subsidies, while he was well versed in the talking points of industry and the liberals.
