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                                                                                PRESS, Page 46

Are the Media Too Liberal?


Elections provide the perfect excuse to dissect biases -- but
past outcomes suggest that even if reporters could manage a
conspiracy, it wouldn't change the results

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/
Los Angeles, Sophfronia Scott Gregory/New York and Nancy Traver/
Washington


    Two weeks ago, a woman called the reader line at the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer with the kind of complaint that
overheated partisans make to nearly every news organization in
nearly every election year. "The picture on page 4 of Vice
President Quayle," she said, "shows his mouth screwed up, while
beside him Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown looks very happy." The
same thing happens, the woman added, whenever the paper runs
photos of President Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton,
or for that matter other nominees of each party. "The
Republicans are always frowning. The Democrats are always
happy."

    Journalists tend to laugh off such hypersensitivity. Any
veteran of a newspaper or TV newscast knows it's a miracle the
product gets out at all. Ideological conspiracy would be beyond
the capacities of management -- not to mention temperamentally
implausible for the fractious, jostling group of egos found in
any newsroom. Besides, most journalists are by nature
opportunists whose ideology or other loyalties would never stop
them from pursuing a career-making story. If there were bias,
what difference would it make? Despite the supposedly pervasive
liberalism of the major news media, American voters have put
conservative Republicans in the White House in 20 of the past
24 years.

    But this year, after countless breast-beating symposiums
and innumerable studies about fairness, millions of Americans
remain passionately resentful of what they consider a marked
liberal bias. While few reporters will acknowledge the facts
publicly, it is widely admitted in private that many journalists
covering Bill Clinton feel generational affinity and unusual
warmth toward him -- and that much of the White House press
corps disdains President Bush and all his works. Says White
House reporter James Gerstenzang of the Los Angeles Times, one
of the few who will speak on the record: "Reporters feel
condescension and contempt for Bush. There really is that
attitude. They're openly derisive." It is not hard to find savvy
political journalists who think Bush may yet win. It is very
difficult to find many who will vote for him.

    There are plenty of reasons apart from ideology for the
political press to favor Clinton. One is pure ambition: many
reporters covering Clinton hope to follow him to the White House
press corps, a major career move, while those who have had the
beat during the Reagan and Bush years would gladly shift to
editing or columnizing. Another reason is access. Out on the
hustings, especially during the primaries, Clinton was
inevitably more accessible than a sitting President, who must
split his time between campaigning and governing. Moreover, as
a matter of style and strategy, even when they are on the road,
"access to the Bush and Quayle campaigns has been almost nil,"
notes Josh Mankiewicz, political reporter at Los Angeles's
K-CAL. Says Mary Tillotson of CNN: "The President used to come
back and schmooze with us on Air Force One. We haven't seen him
up close for months."

    By far the biggest factor, however, is a variation on the
one that is apparently motivating voters: a simple yearning for
change. After a dozen years of Republican rule, journalists
hunger for new battles, new issues, above all new faces. A
change in ruling party always energizes politics and boosts
stories to the front page or the opening of the newscast. Says
a Washington Post reporter: "God, I hope Bush doesn't get
re-elected. It'll be so boring: no fresh ideas, the same old
people running the show and more Capitol Hill gridlock. A
Clinton Administration would be a much better story." In all
likelihood, four years from now the same reporters will turn on
Clinton with the same jaded ferocity.

    For all the charges of favoritism, Clinton has hardly
enjoyed a free ride. The media -- a term carelessly used to
embrace everything from supermarket tabloids to the respectable
press to prime-time sitcoms -- gave Republicans much of their
ammunition: the purported romance with Gennifer Flowers,
controversies over his draft record and personal investments,
allegations of favors to his mother and other allies. Indeed,
there was something downright unseemly about the armies of
reporters tripping over one another in Arlast spring, scrambling
to dig up dirt on Clinton. But that was when polls had the
Democrat third in a three-way race. As campaign reporters are
quick to point out, the cheerier coverage and splashier play
started when Clinton surged in the polls. Says David Lauter, who
covers Clinton for the Los Angeles Times: ``When people say
Clinton has been favored in the press, there's a certain amount
of amnesia going on. For that matter, at the end of the Gulf War
people were writing that the Democrats would be silly to bother
running against Bush."

    Even now Clinton is being grilled about his record as
Governor by news organizations that regret having taken at face
value Michael Dukakis' 1988 claims about the "Massachusetts
miracle," which dissipated into deep recession almost
immediately after the election. Thus Clinton's supposed allies
in the press are doing to him exactly what the G.O.P. did to
Dukakis four years ago: taking away the main advantage of his
being a challenger by forcing him to run on his record rather
than his promises. The general public apparently perceives the
results as evenhanded. In a national poll taken Sept. 22 for
Times Mirror, 71% of respondents thought Bush had been treated
fairly by the press, and 74% thought Clinton had.

    Having chastised themselves for spending too much time in
1988 covering tactics, symbolism and the who-will-win horse
race, journalists this time laboriously boned up on details of
economics and public policy. In a typical incident, after
Clinton spoke about urban issues in Los Angeles in August,
reporters converged on policy aide Bruce Reed, grilling him for
so many intricate details that he had to telephone headquarters
for more data.

    Claims of media bias persist regardless of the outcome of
any particular election. One has to ask which of the media: the
Philadelphia Inquirer or the National Enquirer, the Wall Street
Journal or the New Republic, Nightline or A Current Affair? And
on which issues? Few people fall at exactly the same place in
the left-right spectrum on everything from economics, the
environment and foreign policy to such social issues as gay
rights and abortion. On many economic and environmental matters
-- and even, to a lesser degree, on the social issues around
which the Republicans focused their convention -- the
mainstream press mirrors the concerns of average Americans,
according to many polls. If "bias" is defined as deviating from
the statistical consensus, front-tier news organizations show
bias mainly by lacking a sizable conservative minority to temper
the prevailing view.

    The pivotal question is whether reporters' personal values
actually color their stories. Although it seems self-evident
that they do, some scholars, such as political scientist Michael
Genovese of Loyola Marymount University, contend that there is
no clear proof of it. ABC's Brit Hume says his avowed
conservatism never intrudes on his work: "It's not hard to keep
bias out; you just have to be conscious of it. Most reporters
are in denial." Some journalists go to great lengths to appear
neutral. Executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. of the Washington
Post abstains from voting and urges his staff, especially
political correspondents, to do the same. Still, no one who
reads the Post news columns regularly can have much doubt about
the paper's basic point of view.

    As the late CBS commentator Eric Sevareid was fond of
pointing out, there is plenty of biased reading and hearing as
well as reporting. Many news consumers object fiercely to a
story not because it is inaccurate but because the truth it
tells is unhelpful to their side. Often the objection is not to
the content but to the amount of attention it is given, and thus
to the story's effect on public opinion. That amounts to
denouncing media manipulation while urging an alternative
manipulation of the electorate's right to know.

    In truth, journalists are rarely loyal ideologues. Says
syndicated columnist Richard Cohen: "Liberal or conservative,
a reporter is a primitive being who would go after his own
mother if he thought that was a good story." Some of the
toughest stories about Clinton have emerged from the liberal New
York Times and Los Angeles Times. Bush's two most ferocious
critics, syndicated columnists William Safire of the New York
Times and George Will of the Washington Post, are staunch
members of his own party. That summarizes the deepest objection
most politicians have to journalists -- not that they are
liberal, nor that they are conservative, but that they are
stubbornly individualistic and persistent.