Crisp: Exposing the myth of the crazy, liberal media

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In a column a few weeks ago I expressed some wistful nostalgia over the plight of newspapers in a world dominated by around-the-clock electronic media that depend primarily on images and talk.
For some time, newspaper circulation and advertising revenue have been in decline and newsroom staff is shrinking. Readers of a certain age share these concerns. But a surprising number of e-mailers blame newspapers for their own decline and potential demise, which they consider to be their just desserts for the sorry sin of liberal bias.
This is a peculiar assertion in light of other obvious and logical explanations for the shift away from the demands that newspapers make on readers to the passivity of cable news or to constantly updated Internet sources. Yet prominent columnist and commentator Bill O'Reilly reasserts this assertion recently in, of all places, a newspaper column distributed to the mainstream media and headlined in my local paper as "The liberal media are taking a pounding."
O'Reilly contends, with more than a little gloating, that the financial troubles of newspapers like the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune," the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer," and even the "New York Times," all prime examples of what he calls the "crazy-left media," are the direct result of the disaffection of real Americans, whom O'Reilly calls the "folks," for the "former hippies" and "Abbie Hoffman wannabes" who run the newspapers.
These claims are made with almost no evidence and only the flimsiest rationale to explain the center-left shift in government in a country that he contends is so disenchanted with the left-wing media.
Permit me an assertion of my own: O'Reilly's contention about the crazy-left liberal media lies somewhere between misleading and just plain wrong. As evidence to support this assertion, I'll depend on Eric Alterman's 2003 book "What Liberal Media?" in which he convincingly demolishes often-repeated misconceptions about the political tendencies of mainstream media.
Space doesn't permit a thorough discussion of Alterman's arguments here, but they deserve consideration by anyone who takes seriously assertions about the liberal press by commentators like O'Reilly and Fox News cohort Sean Hannity. The problem is that if these assertions are repeated often enough and emphatically enough, even without evidence, people begin to believe them, despite their disconnection to reality.
The psychology is interesting: Alterman refers to "useful myths," stories that we choose to believe, even if they're not true, because they help explain what we already think is reality. For example, the contention that higher education is a dangerous hotbed of liberalism is more often repeated than proven.
Or consider the generally held and often-repeated belief that the United States Postal System is a bungling, incompetent, overstuffed bureaucracy. It's always struck me as a minor miracle that I can write an address on an envelope, affix a comparatively modest amount of postage to it, place it in a box in front of my house, and then have it deposited a few days later at an address hundreds or thousands of miles away with an incredible degree of dependability. In fact, I've tested this thousands of times and have never known of any of my mail going astray due to a fault of the U.S.P.S. Never.
And yet the myth of postal ineptitude persists, along with myths about welfare moms, food stamp frauds, and the shiftless poor. The problem is that the truth is in the details, and it's often more complicated than we have patience for. Therefore the regular repetition of a forceful assertion -- like O'Reilly's -- takes on a sort of self-perpetuating "truth" of its own.
Hence, the epigraph to Alterman's book, from Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer": "Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest ..."

(John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.. E-mail him at jcrisp(at)delmar.edu. For more news and information visit www.scrippsnews.com.)

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