The (liberal) beat goes on.

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: Mass Media - Liberal press bias

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THERE MAY BE NO issue Which exemplifies the culture war in the U.S. better than media criticism. The mainstream media has been under serious attack as demonstrating a pronounced liberal bias for at least a half-century, beginning with Vice Pres. Richard Nixon's claim in 1954 that "Radio and television commentators as well as a great proportion of the working press are on the other side." This issue always was with him and, in his famous, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" press conference pursuant to his loss for the California governorship in 1962, he said famously that "television, radio, the press," if they were "against a candidate," that they had the moral obligation to "put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate said now and then." Liberals and liberal journalists see such Nixon rants as evidence that he was paranoid; conservatives see them as condign outrage over liberal bias in the press.

Two years after Nixon apparently had left the political scene, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz.) made similar, but less acutely angry accusations regarding liberal press bias. In one interesting, lengthy interview on the hilarious but liberal Steve Allen late night show, Allen and Goldwater went after each other on the issue, with Allen focusing on the John Birch Society and Goldwater pointing to the prejudicial mainstream press coverage of his campaign. Goldwater then echoed Nixon's plea to major newspapers covering his 1964 run for the presidency to "put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate said now and then."

Over the years and, in particular, in the last two decades, there may be no more salient disagreement between liberals and conservatives than over the issue of media bias. Conservatives see it in all mainstream media, including newspapers, television, radio, magazines, publishing houses, blogs, and, most arrogantly, Hollywood. Many conservative media publications forward this view, from Bernard Goldberg's Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair to Ann Coulter's many works and blogs and on and on. Many liberals--inexplicably, in this writer's view--claim media bias exists more strikingly against liberalism, as evidenced by Eric Alterman of The Nation in What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News, and other such sources. If there is an overreach by conservatives on this matter, it may be in the hesitancy to recognize a conservative bias in...