Here’s an odd headline. What could this be about?
Slate, Savannah Jacobson, 1 Aug 2022: Why the New York Times’ Post-Roe Abortion Coverage Has Felt a Little Off, subtitled, “It’s the same problem that always plagues the Times.”
The New York Times is of course the flagship newspaper of the nation. (Unless perhaps you view all news through the prism of a businessman, in which case it’s Wall Street Journal.) Sure it makes occasional mistakes (which it corrects); sure the entire right ignores it for not conforming to their version of reality; and even some on the left are bothered by its tokens of “wokeness.” But it’s still the most comprehensive paper in the nation, and like all centrist publications, strives to represent the attitudes and opinions of a wide spectrum of the population. It’s very high in the middle of the now-famous Media Bias Chart.
(I’ve read NYT for 30 years, when a couple I made friends with in the early 1990s subscribed to the Sunday Times each weekend. I began going out to local newsstands — this is when I lived in Granada Hills — to buy the Sunday Times, and eventually subscribed to the Times every day. And even for 20 years before *that* I had been reading the NYT Book Review, part of the Sunday paper but sold separately several days in advance from bookstores.)
\
So what is this problem that’s plagued the Times? It’s an attempt to be fair, to the point of “false balance” or bothsidesism.
“What I want people to understand about newspapers,” [one-time executive editor Dean] Baquet said on Colbert, “is first off, how hard we try. We print 300 stories a day. They are 99 percent accurate. We make mistakes. When we catch them, we own up to it.”
Baquet is not wrong. The reporters and editors who make the paper of record are, very often, among the best in the field. A spot on the Times’ politics desk is one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism. But somehow, their political reporters have been deemed experts in everything, and their way of looking at the world—largely via covering the tensions of our two-party system—has infected the Times at large. It’s how they end up writing a piece that makes it sound like abortion is still up for debate in Ireland even as the issue is headed toward a definitive vote. And it’s created a false outlook on the world as left vs. right—a phenomenon countless media critics have deemed “both-sides-ism”—and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the paper’s recent coverage of reproductive health care in the U.S.
So the problem is covering abortion as if it is a political debate. Another take is this —
Much of the Times’ political coverage reads as though it takes for granted that its audience is liberal. That starting point leads to an assumption that its readers are already familiar with political thought that falls left of center. What needs elucidating, the paper would seem to think, is the mysterious world of conservatism. It is this impulse that has seemed to be animating the paper’s coverage of the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
This sounds like an accusation but I think it’s mostly true, if you read “liberal” to mean “well informed and comfortable with nuance” and “conservatism” as “beholden to ideology over facts and given to black-and-white thinking.”
The piece goes on with many examples of articles or opinion pieces published in NYT that illustrate this skew. My broader interest is how the media, any media, can try to depict all sides of an issue and inevitably fail. The piece ends:
If the Times seeks to be the nation’s arbiter of facts, then it has to deal in reality. Too often, seeking to rebut claims of liberal bias, the paper presents the world as if it is lived by two types of people, conservatives and liberals, who are evenly powerful and generally reasonable.
— Pause right here: they are not both “generally reasonable” and the conservatives know this, otherwise they wouldn’t have tried to overthrow the results of the last election, which they lost. Back to our quote —
But most Americans—57 percent, according to Pew Research and 63 percent according to a more recent CNN poll—disapprove of the repeal of Roe. Treating the minority that embraces it with more curiosity and empathy than the majority who opposes it will lead it to skewed perceptions of the reality on the ground.
Many things can be true: the Times is one of the world’s most valuable journalistic institutions, the Times is too full of itself, the Times is vital, the Times is missing the point. The paper is once again suffering from an oft-lamented problem, its ongoing case of bothsidesism, while also doing a great deal of good work. If only they could bring the same level of curiosity to the side that has majority support.
\
The bottom line is that there *is always bias* of a sort in the media and everywhere else. You can’t tell an anecdote, your friend can’t tell a story about what happened to him on his vacation, with filtering the facts at hand into what you or they think are the most important. That’s a kind of bias (or: it’s an instinctive skill for storytelling. Or: it’s a deliberate political skill to incite crowds).
But this isn’t what people mean when they complain about “media bias.” They complain that the “mainstream media” is *deliberately* skewing their telling of events to conform to one ideology or another — to those who complain, the ideology they don’t agree with. Virtually all right-wingers, complaining about any news coverage that doesn’t conform to their ideology.
There are both extreme left-wing and right-wing sites that do this; see the Media Bias Chart. But the NYT is not one of them. In contrast, the most successful media outlet that employs this kind of bias, is, of course, Fox News.
