by Michael Parta
Winter 2004

How many times have you heard or read that the press has a liberal bias? "You can’t believe what you read, because all of the reporters are liberal and they only write what they want, the way they want."

Now we journalists know that this is not true. In fact we try very hard to be objective and unbiased in how we write. But if groups call the kettle black long enough and loud enough, after a while people will agree that the kettle is black, even though it really might be white. The same is true of the supposed liberal press bias. If enough groups call the press liberal and biased continually, people will come to accept that as truth.

The purpose of this, of course, is to make the press irrelevant in the public’s eye: "You can’t trust what you read in the press because they are biased." Which gives rise to all kinds of alternative sources of information that you should then be expected to believe because the mainstream source of information has a liberal agenda.

As an example, if one asked the "man on the street" whom the press favored in the last presidential election, most would probably reply, "Al Gore, of course." A Harvard media study revealed that over the course of the campaign the major newspapers had more positive stories on Bush than on Gore and more negative stories on Gore.

So what does this all mean? Making the mainstream press irrelevant leaves the door open for biased news sources on the fringes. By making fringe news sources relevant when in reality they are not reliable, we have created a situation where their reporting now gets transferred into the mainstream press. Fringe news outlets now become "sources" in themselves. This phenomenon allows political special interest groups to get their twisted message into the mainstream press because now they are considered a viable news source.

If we let people believe that the press has an unsubstantiated bias we will have done a great disservice to the concept "free press, free people," because the press cannot do its job of informing the public effectively if it is perceived as biased.

Michael Parta is the former editor and publisher of the New York Mills Herald, and past president of the Minnesota Newspaper Association and the National Newspaper Association. He has been a member of the News Council since 2001.