liberalmediabias BY STEVEN GREENHUT

Whenever I hear conservatives bash the liberal media, I am of mixed mind. I know that much of what I read in the so-called mainstream media comes from a deep-seated liberal worldview—so deep-seated many editors don’t even recognize it. I’ve experienced it as a reader and a journalist throughout my adult life. Conservatives had it right for many years, and are still often right today, but they have become so instinctive in their media-bias charges that they fail to recognize the degree to which the mainstream media does a good job and the degree to which it has improved in the face of increased competition. And anyone who doesn’t like the mainstream media certainly isn’t dependent on it any more, which is reason enough to chill out about media bias.

So much of what I read in newspapers these days is really good. And I see so many examples of fairness, even on editorial pages that have a different perspective than mine, that I sometimes find myself defending the media more than criticizing it.

A great for-instance came this week in the Sacramento Bee,  where an editorial blasted the seedy gut-and-amend process in in California legislature. In this case, it led to a Democratic-backed union bill that would prohibit localities from banning those awful union-monopoly Project Labor Agreements that essentially force non-union contractors to become de facto union contractors to bid on public works projects. Liberals supposedly believe in choice, but not when it comes to choice in areas of economic life, I suppose.

The Bee has a left-of-center editorial page. Such is life. If I had any hair left, I would have pulled it out after reading many of its opinions. But this editorial pulled no punches, even when it came time to offend Democratic politicians:

“Whether banning PLAs is a good idea remains an open question. But the gut-and-amend measure being jammed through the Legislature at the last minute is a travesty. Steinberg and Pérez should be ashamed of themselves. Rules designed to insure transparency and fairness have been ignored. The bill is another disquieting example of the awesome power that unions wield among majority Democrats in the Legislature.”

Even though the state government work force is among the Bee’s core readership, its positions on pension abuses, for instance, are spot on. Conservatives would be wrong to write off the editorial page there as hopeless.

I love the Blog-o-sphere. I gave up full-time work in the newspaper business to start this think-tank-affiliated Web-based journalism project. It has a blog, by the way, but isn’t a blog. We produce journalism—original news stories, investigations and commentary. We see our role as similar to the mainstream news coverage, except that we are upfront about our biases and worldview. Too often, newspapers claimed to be fair and objective, but the nature of the stories they would cover and the type of people they would interview usually led to some predictable left-of-center conclusions.

For years, newspapers were so focused on their own navels—diversity in the newsroom, for instance, which meant diverse ethnicities rather than diverse worldviews—that they forgot about the news customer. The blogs came around and the wild west of the World Wide Web provided much-needed competition. Readers no longer had to rely on the big local daily or the liberal talking heads on the network news to get their information. This competition improved a lot of the newspaper reporting, even though the competition caused cutbacks in news staff and led to less coverage in certain areas.

 CalWatchdog started up to provide additional state news coverage at a time when newspapers were cutting back on state bureaus. With a total of three employees and some stringers, we can only help fill in the blanks. As a news junkie, I love how the new media world is more competitive in some ways, but more collegial in others. I just like to see good stories get out there and love the way the new media links to other media. Unfortunately, much of the online coverage is just commenting on others’ coverage or conjecture. That’s why we do a lot of original reporting here.

I got into the newspaper business in 1995. I was a building and remodeling editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine, but my core interest was politics. Frustrated at the maddening liberalism of the local hometown newspaper, the Des Moines Register, I decided to get a newspaper job and see how far I could go. The Register didn’t hire me, but it did run my columns—even though they ran contrary to the editorial page’s liberalism.

Since then, I’ve worked at two newspapers and been published in dozens of them. I have yet to name an instance in which I believe I was unfairly treated for my libertarian views. I’ve gotten some odd looks and snubs from fellow journalists, but my conclusion is one of the main reasons that newspapers had so few conservative perspectives in them was that conservatives were so sure about bias that they never pursued careers in journalism.

I love newspapers and I love the new media. I love a good debate and forthright opinions. I like reading things I don’t agree with, as long as the writer deals honestly with both sides of the argument. I also love to read something wonderful on an editorial page that usually annoys me.

Now that I’ve written something nice, I’m betting that something in the paper will make me throw a coffee mug against the wall tomorrow morning.

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