I’ve been meaning to link to this John Tierney column on leftist media bias, because I think it takes an angle we rarely read about from the likes of Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg and the usual cadre of rightist screedists. Writes Tierney:

The problem isn’t so much the stories that appear as the ones that no one thinks to do. Journalists naturally tend to pursue questions that interest them. So when you have a press corps that’s heavily Democratic — more than 80 percent, according to some surveys of Washington journalists — they tend to do stories that reflect Democrats’ interests.

When they see a problem, their instinct is to ask what the government can do to solve it. I once sat in on a newspaper story conference the day after an armored-car company was robbed of millions of dollars bound for banks. The first idea that came up for a follow-up story was: Does this robbery show the need for stricter regulation of armored-car companies?

We kicked this idea around until I suggested that companies in the business of transporting cash already had a strong incentive not to lose it — presumably an even stronger incentive than any government official regulating their security arrangements. That story died, but not the mind-set that produced it.

The surest way to impress the judges for a journalism prize is to write a series of articles that spur a legislature to right some evil, particularly if it was committed by a corporation. When journalists do exposes of government malfeasance, they usually focus on the need for more regulations and bigger budgets, not on whether the government should be doing the job in the first place.

Exactly. I’ve never much cared about media bias one way or the other when it comes to covering the horserace of political campaigns because, frankly, it doesn’t much matter who wins. Our lives wouldn’t be much different today if Kerry had won in 2004. We’d still be in Iraq, and the federal government would still be getting bigger.

Tierney’s right. Our focus should be more focused on the way the media covers seemingly apolitical stories — or doesn’t cover them, as is often the case. Those are the stories that effect real changes in public policy, and almost always for the worse. It’s because of media hysteria over OxyContin, for example, that we have drug cops raiding doctors’ offices, and sick people without anyone to prescribe them pain medication. The media bit early and hard on drug warrior claims that Oxy was devastating the suburbs. But it took constant prodding and probing to get reporters to dig a bit deeper to see if maybe (1) the government wasn’t being honest with its statistics, and (2) even if there was a problem, if perhaps the government was going too far in its effort to erradicate it.

It’s media’s knee-jerk tendency to call for government solutions to every misreported outbreak of kidnappings, shark attacks, corporate greed, school shootings, rainy days, and cold sores that’s irritating. Sometimes, bad things happen. People screw up. Doesn’t always mean we need Congress to come save us. And when was the last time you saw the media report on a wasteful, corrupt, or overly aggressive government agency?

It’s this kind of bias that’s given rise to the massive regulatory state, which stilfes innovation, protects anachronistic industries, erodes civil liberties, and slows economic growth.

Call it “there oughtta be a law” syndrome.

Journalists who point out government failure, not so-called “market failure,” are few and far between. There aren’t enough John Tierneys, John Stossels, Steven Chapmans, and Randy Fitzgeralds in the newsrooms. That’s the bias we ought to be worried about. Political coverage is fluff.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with journalists pointing out wrongdoing on the part of corporations. Please do. If a company’s engaging in ethically questionable practices, that company ought to be exposed, and we as consumers can then punish it approporiately. But those kinds of stories rarely end there. They almost always come with calls for government intervention, which almost always brings unintended consequences, and inevitably adds to the costs of companies trying to compete with the wrongdoing company, meaning the regulations journalists demand many times serve only to benefit the companies they want to regulate.

Not to mention the injustices that result when regulations intended to stop wrongdoing among the big boys get applied to the little people.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 7:34 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.