In the conclusion to All the President’s Spin, which was published in August 2004, we warned that liberals were increasingly following the lead of conservatives and the Bush administration in embracing the worst spin tactics:
Some citizens might hope that things will get better when Bush leaves office. But the problem is unlikely to disappear regardless of who occupies the White House. Bush’s presidency has changed the rules of the game, accelerating a larger trend toward PR-driven deception. By altering the incentives for other politicians and political organizations, Bush has fueled an ongoing arms race in which both sides employ ever more sophisticated tactics to manipulate the public and the press.
Since then, we’ve seen the Center for American Progress, a top liberal group with close ties to Hillary Clinton, continue its pattern of deception. Top liberal publications like The American Prospect have become increasingly doctrinaire. Prominent liberal bloggers are increasingly dogmatic and hateful toward conservatives (see, for instance, here, here, and here). Even the excellent left-of-center blogger Josh Marshall has adopted the GOP tactic of suggesting that the other side is helping Al Qaeda (here and here) and has become increasingly sloppy in making partisan claims that are unsupported by the facts (here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Another troubling sign comes from the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, a brilliant but frequently intemperate blogger, who responds to a Greg Sargent post criticizing the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman (a frequent DeLong target) by accusing Weisman and other Post reporters of having “a definite ideological agenda”:
And it’s not as though the mistakes of Weisman and company make equal-opportunity stupidity-driven mistakes. There’s stupidity here. There’s a fundamental misconception of the role of the journalist. And there is a definite ideological agenda here.
However, there’s no proof of an “ideological agenda” on the part of “Weisman and company.” Indeed, Weisman’s response to Sargent’s post suggests that the original complaint was overstated. [Update: On reflection, the Weisman/Murray lede is badly written and misleading.]
But let’s set aside the details of this particular controversy for now. The larger point is that DeLong is falling into the inferential traps that plague the anti-media “bias” groups:
(1) Selection bias — Does DeLong read everything Weisman writes, or are articles more often brought to his attention when liberals object? If the latter, then he may be seeing a biased sample of Weisman’s work. This is a classic problem in anti-“bias” polemics.
(2) Partisan/ideological interpretations — Too many attacks on media bias boil down to objections against reporting that critics don’t like. Can DeLong document a pattern of errors that would survive non-partisan scrutiny? Or do many of his complaints depend on premises that only Democrats or liberals would agree with?
(3) Failure to consider other rationales — Even if the overall pattern of errors in Weisman’s work is skewed against Democrats, that doesn’t mean that he is personally biased. DeLong raises “stupidity” and “a fundamental misconception of the role of the journalist” as partial explanations for Weisman’s behavior, but also asserts that “there is a definite ideological agenda here” because “it’s not as though the mistakes of Weisman and company make equal-opportunity stupidity-driven mistakes” (sic). But this is hardly sufficient.
There are many reasons why reporting may be more unfavorable to one side than the other that do not involve an “ideological agenda.” Conservative anti-“bias” critics have been attacking journalists for years and have succeeded in intimidating a large number of reporters. Republicans dominated Washington from 2001-2006, and it is well known that journalists defer to political power generally and seek to maintain access to those in power. Some unfair reporting may simply be the result of unconscious biases or pressure to tailor news to the tastes of their customers. In some cases, reporters may simply be manipulated by their sources. The list goes on and on. So why does DeLong implicitly rule out all of these possible explanations out and leap to bias?
(4) Inability to demonstrate motivation — Most fundamentally, there is no way to know who is actually biased or for those who are accused to demonstrate that they are not biased. It is an unprovable accusation. Neither DeLong nor anyone else can show that Weisman has an “ideological agenda.”
For more, see my previous media bias posts and our writing on the subject at Spinsanity, particularly our column on the Media Research Center and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
[Disclosure: I resigned from guest-blogging with Sargent on The American Prospect’s Horse’s Mouth blog in September 2006 after TAP’s online editor asked me to stop criticizing liberals.]