At National Review Online’s The Corner on Tuesday, NR senior editor Jay Nordlinger was spurred by the David Weigel controversy and the open-mic press pounding on Sarah Palin’s California college speech to suggest conservatives aren’t loud or persistent enough about protesting bias against the Right: I think many of my conservative colleagues are far too gingerly when it comes to liberal media bias. Far too timid, delicate, and forgiving. For a long time, complaining about media bias has been seen as uncouth. It’s something we all need to learn to live with, like death, taxes, and mosquitoes. Don’t be uncool by bitching about it, man…. Conservatives should be frank and bold when it comes to the media, as to everything else. And if others say you’re tiresome or whiny or uncool…well, so be it. Did you sign up for conservatism to be cool? One more thing, before I go: I have a friend who’s an old-school political reporter, practically a dinosaur. He stresses the principle, “No cheering in the pressbox” — a statement taken from sports journalism, obviously. No cheering in the pressbox? The guys I have in mind — mainstream-media reporters all — don’t so much cheer as turn cartwheels while blowing on vuvuzelas. And they are cartwheeling and blowing for the Democratic party. Obviously, we agree, like Willie Horton proclaimed from prison “Obviously, I’m for Dukakis.” Nordlinger compared it to a column by former New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal about anti-Semitism, that people were too polite when they should be making accusations. Every now and then, the curtain is pulled back on the mainstream media — and we see how these guys talk and act when they’re at their most authentic. This is important. Liberal media bias is maybe something we all have to live with, but that doesn’t mean it’s something to ignore, be blasé about, or excuse. I’m grateful to both Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters for something: They admitted, yes, the media are liberal, and a good thing, too. It has to be that way, they said. For — and this is Walters talking — journalism involves the “human condition,” and liberals care about the human condition. Unlike conservatives, who of course couldn’t give a rat’s a** about the human condition. Here are two Cronkite gems we found that illustrate Nordlinger’s point: that journalists are only liberals because they have been sensitized, granted an emotional intelligence by exposure to the “meaner side of life,” unlike those Republicans. “I think they [most reporters] are on the humane side, and that would appear to many to be on the liberal side. A lot of newspaper people — and to a lesser degree today, the TV people — come up through the ranks, through the police-reporting side, and they see the problems of their fellow man, beginning with their low salaries — which newspaper people used to have anyway — and right on through their domestic quarrels, their living conditions. The meaner side of life is made visible to most young reporters. I think it affects their sentimental feeling toward their fellow man and that is interpreted by some less-sensitive people as being liberal.” — Cronkite to Time magazine’s Richard Zoglin in an interview published in the magazine’s November 3, 2003 edition. “I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities – the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated. We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism – that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.” — Cronkite in his debut as a syndicated columnist, August 6, 2003. If you don’t follow Nordlinger’s “Impromptus” columns , you should give them a try. [Hat tip: Blue & White Soul Food]
