Newspaper of Record?
A Market Opportunity
Some newspaper of stature will reorganize itself to correct the massive bias of the elite broadsheets against Republicans, as revealed in the SwiftBoatVets v. Kerry saga. (Glenn Reynolds had an excellent synopsis of where we are today in the WSJ. My pieces are here and here.)
Some newspaper will take steps to police itself against reporting unduly influenced by the 12 to 1 bias of reporters towards Democrats. Some newspaper will take steps to incorporate the power of the blogosphere into its reporting structure. (At a minimum, elite newspapers need to prevent getting blindsided again by the Republican-conservative-libertarian lawyers and professionals with itchy typing fingers like Glenn, Hugh Hewitt, the Powerline lawyers, Tom McGuire, Ed Morrissey, and many others.)
One Leading Candidate
If any newspaper in the elite class is capable of reform, it might be the Washington Post. The Post has the best reason of any major liberal newspaper to attempt greater balance. It exists in Washington, where the GOP is in charge of quite a lot of government, and is poised to continue to do so. The Post surely cannot want to continue to see the Washington Times grow, and it certainly wants to reverse the circulation decline of the last decade to less than 800,000. With the New York Times so transparently partisan and in serious decline, the Post just might be able to become the newspaper of record for the United States.
The Post was two weeks late to the Swift Boat party, just like the New York Times. But when it finally reported, it did not do a hit piece like Nagourney’s in the Times, but offered some fine and balanced work from Michael Dobbs, which continues to this day.
Moreover, while the Post’s editorial board whined about the SwiftBoatVets, it ran an excellent op-ed by Joshua Muravchik on Christmas in Cambodia the same day.
More Dissent Welcomed
Today, we see some further evidence of an effort at balance in a Benjamin Ginsberg op-ed:
When the Bush-Cheney campaign filed a detailed, 70-page complaint detailing illegal coordination by Democrats, the move produced 14 news articles, with no follow-up. When the Kerry campaign filed an unsupportable charge of coordination about the Swift boat ads, there were 74 articles, and the pack swarmed.
Perhaps the reason is that, politically and culturally, reporters are far from representative of the voters or politicians they claim to cover objectively and fairly, as shown in a study by the Pew Research Center. That study concluded that “journalists at national and local news organizations are notably different from the general public in their ideology and attitudes toward political and social issues. . . . [N]ews people, especially national journalists, are more liberal, and far less conservative, than the general public. . . . About a third of national journalists (34 percent) . . . describe themselves as liberals; that compares with 19 percent of the public. . . . Moreover, there is a relatively small number of conservatives at national and local news organizations. Just 7 percent of national news people . . . describe themselves as conservatives, compared with a third of all Americans.”
In a 50-50 nation, how do the media square this imbalance with the claim of being objective, fair and nonpartisan? The double standard in reporting on 527s suggests that some of the withering scrutiny visited on the Swift boat veterans should be directed inward.
Now, we are certainly not suggesting that the Post needs to become a conservative paper. We rather enjoy commentary that bashes Republicans when it is cleverly done, like this Tom Shales quip, as reported by Ed Morrissey:
At the Fox network, the Republican convention is being covered like a happy birthday party for God, with the channel’s right-leaning commentators and anchors hanging on for the joyride of their lives, all but turning cartwheels.
Our Advice
First, the easy advice: hire Glenn Reynolds or another of the leading bloggers above as a consultant to create an institutional ability at the Post to interact with the quality parts of the blogosphere, of which there are many. Second, the really hard part: there has to be a cadre of reporters and editors within the Post who are not treated as a viral infection, and whose immediate reaction to seeing the SwiftBoatVets campaign is not disdain and skepticism, but that their claims are true. That’s a tall order, and I don’t know that it is possible within the culture of the Post.
As I have previously written at length, most elite companies find it very hard to change, due to the power and arrogance of their internal cultures, and instead of doing so, they allow others to exploit the market opportunity. The NYT is following in the path of US Steel, GM, and AT&T, for example. But companies sometimes do change, with dramatic positive results. GE under Jack Welch and IBM under Lou Gerstner are but two examples of elephants that learned to dance. The Post doesn’t need to dance; it just needs a little more elephant.