"An Opinionated Network" is what Howard Kurtz makes of a recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that, in declaring Fox News' claim to balanced reporting faulty, appears to have conflated on-air personality with news content. Omission and methodical control over the perception of news is gentry media's most destructive contribution of bias to American journalism, and Kurtz makes his own here straightaway by failing to inform readers that the Project for Excellence in Journalism — led by media critic Tom Rosenstiel — is the left's answer to rightist Brent Bozell's Media Research Center. Rosenstiel maintained in 2002 that among other mainstream anchors CBS's Bob Schieffer — who continues to deny any meaningful leftward tilt to major news outlets, even in Rathergate's wake — is "trying to cut it down the middle," whereas "Fox is not."
Driving ideology aside, the report as explained by Kurtz draws the left's favorite conclusion — that Fox News has achieved cable and broader television success by daily tossing red meat to Republicans — from information that doesn't support it. The first charge is a play in semantics:
In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says. By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views.
Is the PEJ talking about slanted coverage? Not from Kurtz's explanation — the activity is merely an anchor or journalist adding a personal comment to a report. He offers two examples:
Last March, Fox reporter Todd Connor said that "Iraq has a new interim constitution and is well on its way to democracy.""Let's pray it works out," said anchor David Asman.
Another time, after hearing that Iraqis helped capture a Saddam Hussein henchman, Asman said: "Boy, that's good news if true, the Iraqis in the lead."
The choice of quotes is illustrative for two reasons: first, as indicators of bias they're spectacularly weak and second; as a corollary, the PEJ's selection exposes the elite media's fascination with an inviolable neutrality to all things political, national, ethical and moral but that is more like an opposition to Western liberalism. If Asman is to be considered subjective on the basis of his first remark then one must put forward the value of "the other side," the suggestion that it might have been reasonable to pray for a collapse of Iraq's democratic efforts. Certainly there are those who do make that argument but as failed presidential candidate John Kerry revealed by checking his personal indifference to Iraqi pluralism with a generic nod to its success before his broadest audiences, these people are not taken seriously. Nor has the American interest in Iraqi self-reliance ever been a point of disagreement between anyone; Democrats, Republicans or the fringe. Senator Ted Kennedy, if he were better able to comprehend events in theater, would find news of Iraqis' increasing efficacy as welcome as would Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
David Asman, then, was in these two instances speaking for most Americans. Were the reports themselves unfair? Apparently not.
The problem seems to be that Asman voiced support for an American endeavor at all. In 2001 National Public Radio senior foreign editor Loren Jenkins insisted that as a public employee he in fact didn't "represent the government" but "history, information, what happened." In 2003, ABC President David Westin forbade talent from wearing flag lapel pins on grounds that "our patriotic duty as journalists in the United States is to try to be independent and objective and present the facts to the American people and let them decide all the important things." The leftist media rejects nationality and moral authority in favor of a transnational, relativist baseline: American, but not; unconvinced that the free world is incomparably superior to its authoritarian enemies, working to robe in cause and worth those who by nature defy it. "Objectivity" is not so much a practice than a condition, including objectivity to value itself.
The PEJ report throws a few numbers at Fox news shows like Special Report with Brit Hume and The O'Reilly Factor that are summarily invalidated by the study's metric. Brit Hume's program usually includes two or three guests for topical commentary, and holds a panel debate through the last two segments. Bill O'Reilly is successful precisely because of his opinions, scoring high ratings on the guarantee that his subjective arguments are honest.
A focus on journalists' comments on the night's filing is a red herring — what about the report itself? Here, the American news audience speaks clearly: consistently polls show an overwhelming perception, sometimes by a ratio of 2-to-1, of leftist slant to coverage, despite elite agencies' continued — if disintegrating — controlling interest in the national conversation. For all the media establishment's protestations of innocence and accusations against Fox News like this PEJ report, there is something to the idea that Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather kept their opinions not so much under wraps as under the byline — and that, loudmouth or not, you can trust somebody if he gives you all the serious angles.
One collection of figures Kurtz provided was amusing, if painfully illustrative of the gentry's disconnection between headlines and reality. According to PEJ's study, Fox was about twice as likely to broadcast "positive" stories from Iraq than cable competitors CNN and MSNBC. Well, yes: on January 29th of this year, Fox News was warily hopeful of Iraq's Assembly elections while MSNBC prepared for disaster. What happened the next day?