Editor's Note: This story, corrected 9/2/04, misrepresented a quote from CBS correspondent John Roberts. The Texan regrets the error.
Evan Thomas, the assistant managing editor of Newsweek, said it best: "The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they are going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all." With such a straight-forward admittance, it is becoming harder and harder for the American left to effectively deny the existence of liberal bias in the mainstream media.
Yet, who in their right mind actually believed that the media were neutral? In a survey conducted by John Tierney of The New York Times, about 75 percent of journalists outside Washington, D.C., believed that Kerry would make the better president. Of those journalists in our nation's capital, over 90 percent favored Kerry. But what, you may ask, is wrong with having an opinion?
The problem with this is that the talking heads of cable news channels are letting their own political leanings shape the fabric of our nation's news. This results in Americans basing less of their own views on facts and more on the opinions of journalists and reporters. With CBS' John Roberts espousing "I talked to one delegate yesterday who said '...I will tell you this: I have fallen in love with John Edwards,'" and John Harwood, national political editor for The Wall Street Journal, calling Teresa Heinz Kerry the "sexiest spouse of a national candidate in my lifetime," it is understandable that a large portion of the American public has lost faith in objective news coverage.
And it is this attitude that has empowered the left's worst nightmare. When Rupert Murdoch and Fox News were just setting up shop, many analysts looked past them to MSNBC as the future rival of CNN. After all, it seemed that it would require the pooled resources and capital of NBC and Microsoft to challenge Ted Turner's media empire.
But those analysts forgot that about half of this country does not lean in the same direction as the vast majority of reporters. They simply underestimated the demand for a conservative-leaning news channel to counter the left-wing media. In a way, it was the death of objective journalism and the rise of the liberal bias that allowed Fox News to become the thorn in CNN's side.
But, Fox News is still guilty of perpetuating the same type of biased coverage, despite being only one news channel in a sea of liberal media sources, and their rampant success has only increased the fervor of those on the left. Peter Jennings repeatedly referred to John Edwards as the vice president during the Democratic National Convention, and the liberal media have done everything in their power to discredit the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth without thoroughly investigating some of the claims made against Kerry. Can any of this possibly be good for America?
I believe so.
The polarization of the mainstream media coupled with the leftward movement of many news sources has opened up an entire world of independent news. Just as it helped fuel the success of Fox News, the liberal media gave birth to a universe of Weblogs designed and maintained by average Americans seeking to fill the void left behind and to capitalize on the growing news demand.
Individuals like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com and Virginia Postrel of Dynamist.com have effectively and efficiently picked up the slack left by mainstream media, and this small revolution is not going unnoticed. For the first time in history, Webloggers were invited to the Democratic National Convention as members of the media, and popular Weblogs are slowly gaining reputations as intelligent and trustworthy news sources.
It seems that the efforts of the biased mainstream media to suppress and slant the truth should be applauded for creating an army of independent journalists determined to increase the flow of information.
McBride is a computer engineering senior.
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