Debunking the left-leaning press: when it comes to the journalistic standards of fairness and balance, the ultraliberal mainstream media is left wanting.

• Author: Barnes, Fred

LET ME BEGIN BY defining three terms that are thrown around in debates about the media today. The first is objectivity, which means reporting the news with none of your own political views or instincts slanting the story one way or another. Perfect objectivity is pretty hard for anyone to attain, but it can be approximated. Then there is fairness. Fairness concedes that there may be some slant in a news story, but requires that a reporter be honest and not misleading with regard to those with whom he or she disagrees. Finally, there is balance, which necessitates that both sides of an issue or on politics in general--or more than two sides, when there are more than two--get a hearing.

The mainstream media--meaning nationally influential newspapers like The Washington Post. The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal: influential regional papers such as The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times: the broadcast networks and cable news stations like CNN; and the wire services, which now are pretty much reduced to the Associated Press--do not, in my opinion, stack up very well in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a piece in The New Republic entitled "Media Realignment." The thrust of it was that the mainstream media was shedding some of its liberal slant and moving more toward the center. I pointed to things like certain newspapers championing Reaganomics and the country's economic recovery. I also talked about CNN, which was younger then, and quite different from the way it is now: Ted Turner owned it, but he was not manipulating it the way he did later. Financial news suddenly was very big in the midst of the 401(k) revolution, and the stock market boom was getting a lot of coverage. The New Republic, where I worked, had been pro-Stalin in the 1930s but, by the 1980s, had become very pro-Reagan and anti-communist on foreign policy. I also cited a rise of new conservative columnists like George Will. Looking back on that piece now, I see that I could not have been more mistaken. The idea that the mainstream media was moving to the center was a mirage. In fact, I would say that, compared to what I was writing about back in the 1980s, today's media is more liberal, elitist, secular, biased, sell-righteous, and hostile to conservatives and Republicans.

Liberalism is endemic. Evan Thomas--the deputy editor of Newsweek and one of the few honest liberals in the media--pointed out this very thing with regard to coverage of the 2004 presidential race. It was obvious, he noted, that a large majority of the media wanted John Kerry to win and that this bias slanted election coverage. Indeed, every poll of the media--and there have been quite a few of them--indicate the same thing: the press is overwhelmingly left leaning. Polls concerning who the Washington press corps voted for in 2004, for instance, always show that, by about a nine-to one ratio, they cast their lot with the Democrats. A few years ago, Orlando Sentinel columnist Peter Brown conducted a poll of newspaper staffs all around the country and found that this disparity existed everywhere.

Nor is this likely to change. Hugh Hewitt, the California lawyer, blogger, and radio talk show host, recently spent a few days at the Columbia School of Journalism, supposedly the premiere such restitution in the country. He spoke to a few classes there and polled them on whom they had voted for. He found only one Bush voter. Steve Hayes, a fine young writer and...