By Wayne Youngquist
Are the news media fair to all? To ask the question is to answer it. Of course not!
We all have stories about various instances of unfairness, not to mention gross inaccuracies and bias. Up until the late ‘60s political turmoil on campuses, students at places like Cornell (far above Cayuga's waters and all that) had great faith in the news media Then they read reports about their campus demonstrations and questioned (in a letter to the New York Times) whether the reporter ever left his barstool on 43rd Street. What the students read was nothing like what they saw and participated in.
My own moment of enlightenment came when, as a student leader long ago, I testified before a committee of the Wisconsin Legislature about the House Un-American Activities Committee. Two Milwaukee newspapers reported on my remarks. It was as though two different people had spoken, both of whom had interesting things to say that were nonetheless different from what I thought I said.
Now we have a documentary about Fox News (Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism) that challenges – to put it mildly – Fox's claim to be “fair and balanced).
But it has ever been thus. The liberal leanings of establishment journalists have been extensively researched by academics and have been the stuff of legend and myth. (It has been said by a wag that the final edition of the Washington Post will have as a headline “World Ends/Women and Minorities Affected Most”). And no one questions that there was a slant, mostly conservative or populist, to the Chicago Tribune under Col. McCormick or the Hearst papers when William Randolph the elder was alive.
Criticisms of Fox today mirror the charges of anti-war bias during the Vietnam era by CBS. Many older journalists I have known are proud of CBS during that era, but I have Green Beret friends – Vietnam Vets – who to this day will not watch CBS News. They blame that network for slanted reporting and for the loss of public support for the military. They cite the TET offensive, which they claim was a stunning defeat to the Viet Cong but which CBS (and other outlets as well) portrayed as an American defeat.
At one time, not long ago, almost every city had clearly partisan newspapers. And many of the honored names of journalism – Pulitzer, Annenberg, Hearst – were once at the heart of serious journalism wars involving bare knuckle yellow journalism, and, often, bare knuckles in the street. Fairness and bare knuckles rarely go together.
The era with the most partisan – i.e., the most unfair – news media was in the 1800s. The people took their politics seriously; political parties were like political churches. The press reflected that partisanship. We are seeing this again today. Like an occult hand, partisanship guides much of the media because that is what much of the public wants. This is especially true in an era of dropping newspaper circulation and television news ratings.
But fairness isn't all or nothing. It admits of degrees. Rare is the working journalist, as opposed to the media mogul, who sets out to be unfair. In a quarter century in the news business, I know of only one or two instances.
But, it is not easy being a journalist today. Genuinely professional journalists want to be fair but no one lives on Mt. Olympus. Even with the best of intentions, unfairness creeps in. But beyond that, glory in the media now goes not to the reporter getting his/her facts right but to the opinionmeisters whose job it is to be one-sided.
And in local TV especially, many key decisions are made by people with little or no reporting experience. The producers of local TV newscasts tend to be very intelligent, ambitious young people with little if any field experience. They have been trained to have a sense of what will appeal to viewers (as the number of viewers slides downward) and to produce shows that reflect that sense. They tell the reporters what they want and the reporter gets that story.
If a political consultant or a candidate has to deal with the media, it is probably best to stop worrying about fairness and think about the news media as you would a force of nature. Even the Bible says that forces of nature are unfair, raining – for example – on the just and unjust alike. It makes no difference to go around chiding the wind and the rain. Better to understand how they function.
Some people in politics, often conservatives but not always anymore, want to believe in the complete unfairness of the news media. That is especially true when they are losing; it saves the pain of deep introspection. Winners seem to get along better with news people.
In the years following Watergate, the Republican Party took a real pounding in the news and they responded in kind. In Wisconsin, though, we had a university president (and former Communications professor) who ran for governor as a Republican. His first words to me on the phones were “I need you more than you need me. What do you want?” Usually when reporters showed up at Republican functions, you were greeted with less than warmth. At this guy's functions, we were offered food and beer. He won – big time.
Modern television, especially local news, operates under tight constraints. If you don't understand these, television will seem terrible unfair. The producer wants a tight show and gives the reporter, say 1 minute, 10 second for his/.her piece. That means 1:10 to tell a complete story. That means candidates who ramble on won't find their words of wisdom on television. There was one Democratic candidate for Congress (who has since served for two decades with distinction) who couldn't link subject and verb together explaining why he was running. We showed him talking. His words were lost to history.
But if journalists can and must struggle to be fair even under trying conditions and political types can deal with unfairness by forgetting about intentions and seeking out the laws of the operation of the news media as primeval force, what about the poor reader or viewer?
The solution, it seems to me, is to realize that even with the best of intentions, no single media outlet will present the whole picture. They will see from what the Germans call sitz in Leben – where we sit in life. And the “best of intentions” can sometimes be lacking). It is just not possible to get fairness from a single source. One needs multiple sources, many perspectives. To be fair, the public has to do some work, too.
Wayne Youngquist is a Senior Political Analyst at WISN-TV and
a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater.
He has been involved in reporting and analyzing national
and statewide political campaigns.
