Politico on bias in the press

John F. Harris and Jim Vandehei of Politico wrote a take on the bias in the press against John McCain, titled "Why McCain is getting hosed in the press."

The writing team makes partial use of a traditional defense, stating that ideological bias counts for little because reporters set their own opinions aside so easily. I would say that may be true for the best journalists. But to a large extent one can tell the best ones from the pack by the way they report. I'm talking about the use of non-essential descriptive adverbs in news stories. If reporters allow things like that to creep into their writing, then the chances are good that political opinions can also find their way past the objective filter.

Harris and Vandehei check their own bias on that point.

If that causes skeptics to scoff, perhaps they would find it more satisfying to hear that the reason ideological bias matters so little is that other biases matter so much more.

They seem to be saying it isn't that reporters lean to the left in this case, but something else.

This is true in any election year. But the 2008 election has had some unique — and personal — phenomena.

One is McCain backlash. The Republican once was the best evidence of how little ideology matters. Even during his “maverick” days, McCain was a consistent social conservative, with views on abortion and other cultural issues that would have been odds with those of most reporters we know. Yet he won swooning coverage for a decade from reporters who liked his accessibility and iconoclasm and supposed commitment to clean politics.

This explanation is plausible on its face, but it is just as easily regarded as reporters classifying McCain as an unusually "good" Republican, and then getting nasty when their past apparent errors come to light. In other words, the non-ideological explanation in turn may have its roots in ideology.

On a shallower level, I tend to agree with Harris and Vandehei that most reporters try to report fairly. What I read in the press (not via scientific sampling, unfortunately) leads me to believe that many reporters and editors simply aren't very good at objective reporting in the first place. And it's enough to make a pretty noticeable difference even if we were to allow that "most" reporters actually succeed at reporting with their bias minimized.

Harris and Vandehei make a few other points as well. Readers interested in the issue of journalistic bias may want to read the whole story.