In his very first piece for CJR last week, intern Peter Sterne criticized Politico’s story that alleged a pro-Obama bias in election coverage of the president and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
This week, Sterne went on the radio to discuss it. He was a guest on Monday on The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley on the Sirius Satellite Radio channel POTUS.
“I felt that first of all, it was poorly written, because the way that Politico described these articles against Mitt Romney, they really only considered the impact on the campaign,” Sterne told Farley. “Now, I understand why a politics-focused outlet like Politico would focus primarily on the political implications, but I don’t think that represents real media criticism.”
Listen to the entire interview here.
The interviewee said the NYT's Kill List story was "critical" of Obama's policy. Yeah, it was critical as creepy state-worship goes: tepid reverence, lightly peppered with vicarious concern over superficial political implications. I.e., typical MSM fare.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 10:17 AM
Your intern, like his editors at CJR, is in denial about the political culture of establishment journalism.
CJR should have the courage of its knowledge of its own staff's political leanings, and be able (without feeling as though it is conceding every argument to the hated Right) to acknowledge that a pro-urban, pro-Democratic culture exists in mainstream journalism, and that this has a significant impact on the relationship of mainstream journalism to American society. The New York Times is not shy about ascribing an 'institutional culture' to business organizations, police departments, or other groups in seeking to evaluate/criticize those institutions. But the observation that there is a fairly predictable demographic that enters and advances in the field of political journalism causes panties to bunch up at CJR and much of the rest of the mainstream media.
'Slate', which I expect CJR would concede to be qualified as 'mainstream' and 'centrist' and not unrepresentative of contemporary political/cultural journalism (it has partnered with NPR at times, for instance), is honest enough in the interest of consumer information to poll its writers every four years and reveal their presidential preferences. The vote in 2008 was 53 to nothing in favor of Obama, which surprises no one - certainly not CJR, I suspect - and Slate is not even as fervently Republican-hating as The New York Times in its editorial content (choice of what is 'news', framing devices, vocabulary). There has never been a survey that showed less than overwhelming support for the Democrats among political journalists. I personally know a couple of working journalists now in other fields, and they are down-the-line Democrats now that they are freed from having to be closeted. The migration of Washington journalists to the Obama Administration (and what Jacob Weisberg once called 'Clincest' among journalists and Clinton administration officials before that) is something from which CJR chastely averts its eyes.
There's just . . . too much there . . . for CJR to continue to alternate between huffiness (i.e., the establishment press is much much too professional for anyone to guess the political biases of its functionaries) and Heavy Irony when the fairly obvious 'institutional culture' of the bigger urban news organizations are pointed out. CJR writers seem to be so far gone that I doubt they even recognize why the charges are so durable - dating at least to Eisenhower getting cheered at the 1964 Republican convention for denouncing the liberal establishment press. It's part of the furniture of American politics. CJR acts as though it can't possibly understand why anyone would think that middle-class Park Slope or DuPont Circle denizens may not be representative, in their political outlook, of the country as a whole, and may miss some trends or overplay others because of political blinders.
This has an impact on the quality of the journalism we get. From listening to NPR daily, and reading the NY Times daily, I still have no idea why Mitt Romney is so competitive with Barack Obama in the polls, for example, since the evidence of Obama's rightness on issues runs to almost 100% vis-a-vis Romney based on 'objective' analysis. There exists at the Times and the Post no such phenomena as 'liberal' policies which work to the detriment of a candidate - whereas predictions of being 'too far to the Right' and thus doomed at the polls have been a cliche of political analysis by The Times and The Post since the 1960s. I mean, come on.
PS: Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, including CBS News, recently attended an Obama fund-raiser pt on by wealthy gay groups in L.A. Moonves acknowledged that 'partisanship' is very much a part of political journalism 'now'. Which puts him ahead of CJR in honesty, though partisanship is not new, behind the scenes. (See your own operation's interview w/ Douglas Brinkley on his Cronkite biogra
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 05:42 PM
Hmm, last post cut off. Well, anyway. Why do I still have hope that there are closet cases at CJR who know perfectly well what Politico and the Media Research Center are talking about here? Maybe if just one exists . . .
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 05:49 PM