Liberal Media Bias- Most Americans Just Don't Don't Trust Them

Another nail has just been hammered into the coffin of the so-called mainstream media, an institution I like to call the lamestream media.

A press release accompanying a Gallup poll that has just been released says, “For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% now saying this is a record high by one percentage point.”

For years, I have been talking and writing about bias in the mainstream media, liberal media bias to be precise.  I have said there is no conspiracy.  The network TV anchors don’t go to work in the morning, summon their top lieutenants, dim the lights, pull down the shades, give the secret handshake and salute and then say, “How are we going to nail those conservatives today.”

I was a correspondent at CBS News for 28 years and I can assure you that despite what some on the Right may think, it doesn’t happen that way.  I wish it did, because no one would put up with that kind of blatant bias.  The way it really happens is worse.

The problem is groupthink.  There simply are too many liberals in America’s big, important newsrooms.  News executives worship at the alter of diversity, but what has it gotten us?  White liberals and black liberals, male liberals and female liberals, Latino liberals, Asian liberals, gay liberals and straight liberals.

I have no quarrel with racial, ethnic and gender diversity.  It’s not a good thing to have the news filtered only through white men.  But what about some intellectual diversity in the newsroom?  How about a little diversity of opinion?

No, I don’t want those opinions turning up in straight news stories.  But just as we need women and minorities in the newsroom in order to get a different perspective on the news, we also need conservatives to add their perspective to the dominant liberal news culture in our newsrooms.

Which brings us back to that new Gallup poll.  “Nearly half of Americans (48%) say the media are too liberal,” we are told.  “One-third say the media are just about right while 15% say they are too conservative.”

And this was my favorite line from Gallup: “Democrats and liberals remain far more likely than other political and ideological groups to trust the media and to perceive no bias.”

Gee, I wonder why.  Could it be because liberals like the liberal bias they’re getting from journalists who keep telling themselves they’re not biased?  Could it be because those supposedly objective journalists are putting out information slanted to the left, which is just fine with those liberals and Democrats whose views also slant to the left?

Sorry, my lefty friends, liberal media bias is real.  It is not a figment of fevered conservative imaginations.  And it’s one of the reasons so-called mainstream journalism is dying.

As I say at the end of my book, A Slobbering Love Affair, which chronicles the media’s embarrassing adoration of Barack Obama during the presidential campaign:

“The grim reaper is knocking on the mainstream media’s door, and they remain gloriously oblivious.  They have reached a tipping point but refuse to believe it.  The corrosion that is eating away at their credibility has been happening slowly.  It’s like acid rain; one day you look around all the trees are dead.  Nobody pays attention until it’s too late.

“And when they become so irrelevant that no one listens to them anymore, they undoubtedly will lash out at their critics for poisoning the well.  They will remain arrogant and clueless and blame the media bashers for damaging their standing with the public.  But their demise won’t come from the outside.  It will be an inside job, the result of one too many self-inflicted wounds.

“When that day comes it will be very bad indeed for the mainstream media.  Pray, that their demise doesn’t also lead to ours.”

The numbers in this new Gallup poll ought to make all of us worry, and that includes liberals who are happy with the media.  Everyone knows that we can’t have a free country without a free press.  But neither can we have a free country – not for long anyway – without a fair press.   And when, as Gallup tells us, “the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly” that is very bad news indeed – no matter what your politics.