From a reader:
I happened to catch a small portion of a weekend CNN show about the war. The title of the show was “Iraq and Vietnam” and the panel featured an academic (can’t remember who), Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman. When I turned it on the moderator was asking Paul Krugman about the problem of bias in the press and the moderator introduced the question by pointing out that during the early years of Vietnam the press was supportive of the war and he wondered if the same thing was happening here.
Now how, I wondered, is Krugman going to argue that the press has been too supportive of the president for the duration of this war? It seemed that even for Krugman this would be hard to pull off with a straight face. This was his answer (closely paraphrased): “The whole notion of balance in the press is getting absurd. The joke going around says that if the President came out and declared that the world is flat, the press would turn around and report ‘but there are some dissenting views.’” He then went on to do a comparison with Vietnam and suggested that the reporting on Iraq would turn negative eventually.
Man, that sums it up pretty well. When the right complains about bias, they are saying that a left-leaning point of view dominates the reporting and so the reporting is unbalanced. When the left complains about bias, they aren’t complaining about balance—they are complaining that any view right of center is reported at all.
Sadly, Krugman is undoubtedly right that the MSM believes that they have gone the extra mile to be balanced in their reporting on Iraq (and everything else).
Me: Lest you think I don’t check these things out, here’s Krugman’s actual quote:
KURTZ: …Paul Krugman, journalists, as you know, love to cover two sides: Republicans say this, Democrats say that. It’s the fact that the Democratic Party has been — has not staked out much of an alternative plan here. Even when Jack Murtha made his withdrawal argument, most of the party did not join in.
Has that contributed to what some might call the one-sided coverage in the press about the political debate?
KRUGMAN: Sure. I mean, I once said that if Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headline would read, “Views Differ on Shape of Earth,” that you have this real, real reluctance to actually just state what the facts are. And here you can’t even — or until very recently you couldn’t even do the he said-she said reporting.
That’s part of the reason why a lot of the coverage lagged behind public opinion. It was only when the public had turned against the war, when the public had decided we’d been misled into war, and when the public — and then when some politicians began following the public lead, then we get the media coverage, which is not the way it ought to be. But that’s the way it has actually turned out.