Two sides to every story
Issue of bias and partisanship in campaign press coverage scrutinized
David Brock is president of Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group constantly on the lookout for conservatively skewed campaign news. The organization, he said, ''runs in a war-room fashion. We're in every news cycle."
Brent Baker is a vice president of the Media Research Center, a conservative press monitor ever vigilant for liberal tilt in election journalism. This year's coverage, he said, is ''biased by a million cuts, little things. It's every single day."
It's tempting to dismiss Brock and Baker as ideologues eager to find bias in every headline and sound bite. But the evidence suggests that a good portion of the public -- and some journalists -- share the view that the 2004 election campaign has been marked by press partisanship. With some high-profile journalism blunders mixed into a campaign landscape with a polarized electorate taking cues from critics on the left and right, the media have become nearly as big an issue as the candidates themselves.
An array of liberal groups howled in protest over Sinclair Broadcasting's decision to air parts of an anti-Kerry documentary Friday night on stations throughout the country. Conversely, angry conservatives suspected a political agenda when CBS's ''60 Minutes" aired a piece challenging President Bush's service record that was based on dubious documentation.
A recent survey of 500 journalists found that the issue of biased campaign coverage has emerged as a major concern within the industry. And a new Pew Research Center poll of public attitudes reveals that 90 percent of the respondents believe that journalists often or sometimes ''let their own political preferences influence the way they report the news."
''I think that more things have happened that have probably caught the public's ear," said Andrew Kohut, the center's director.
Along with the Sinclair and ''60 Minutes" controversies, other incidents have provided fodder for those who believe that campaign news has been tainted by ideology:
In February, a rumor -- quickly debunked -- that John Kerry had engaged in an extramarital affair got a public airing thanks to several conservative media players who hyped it, including Internet gossip Matt Drudge and talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh.
Some Bush supporters accused ABC's ''Nightline" of playing politics and inciting antiwar sentiment when Ted Koppel devoted a program in April to reciting the roster of those killed in Iraq.
ABC News political director Mark Halperin triggered a backlash from conservatives after a memo he had written suggesting that the network scrutinize the Bush campaign's distortions about Kerry was leaked.
Conversely, Kerry supporters were angered when Fox News political correspondent Carl Cameron posted a phony story on the Fox website in which the senator supposedly gloated about a manicure.
There is little doubt that voters on both sides of the political spectrum are paying close attention to the campaign and the media's performance. The new Pew survey, which was released yesterday, shows that a whopping 96 percent of the electorate considers this an important election.
Several Pew surveys have provided growing evidence that citizens may be matching their news sources with their ideology. In the new poll, voters who said they get most of their campaign news from Fox News, a frequent target of liberal critics, said they support Bush over Kerry by 70 percent to 21 percent. At the same time Kerry led Bush by 67 percent to 26 percent among viewers who relied on CNN, an outlet that has been in the crosshairs of conservative critics.
Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, has characterized this phenomenon as the ''cafeteria dimension of selecting an outlet to fit one's own views. . . . If you look at how the public really cuts through information, they come at it from a values perspective."
Within the media universe itself, the values wars have heated up this campaign season, bringing new players -- from movie producers to Vietnam War veterans -- into the fray.
Always a lightning rod, the Fox News Channel found itself the target of a new documentary, ''Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald. Another liberal filmmaker, Michael Moore, thrust himself into the middle of the campaign with his scathing assault of Bush in ''Fahrenheit 9/11," triggering a debate over the difference between a documentary and propaganda.
Although talk radio has long been a stronghold of conservative politics, the left countered this year with the creation of Air America, with comedian Al Franken as its marquee personality. Skillfully using friendly talk radio hosts and eager cable news outlets as an echo chamber, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth managed to turn its attack on Kerry's war record into a major campaign issue even as some news outlets began poking holes in the group's claims.
The pervasive sense of media partisanship this election season has apparently begun to ring true with some who work in the business. The Committee of Concerned Journalists interviewed 500 members this month, asking them to identity the biggest problem in campaign reporting and to suggest how to fix it. Committee chairman Bill Kovach was surprised when bias emerged as one of the top problems, with respondents fairly evenly divided between those who thought Kerry was the beneficiary of the bias and those who believed Bush was getting the break.
''I was personally shocked," Kovach said, ''at the number of journalists who sound just like the public."
Mark Jurkowitz can be reached at jurkowitz@globe.com. 