Media Bias?

Complaints By The Media, Of The Media, For The Media

There's always this complaint that there's this thing called 'media bias' and that this bias is always to the left. Fox News often claims it is more balanced because they invite commentators from both sides of the Left-Right divide even the though the host is a frothing-at-the-mouth fascist. It's all self-serving rhetoric that passes for commentary from Fox News, but that's its alleged justification for spreading its noxious disinformation as news. If any media is biased, it's Fox News.

For years, our national carrier the ABC has been under pressure from the Liberal and National parties for its alleged media bias. Successive boards and chiefs have been appointed with a view to changing this alleged mysterious bias, and most of these boards and chiefs fail to accomplish anything of value mostly because the bias is a figment of the Right's imagination. The ABC is not a hotbed of Communists, Trotskists and Marxists. It's a hotbed of frustrated filmmakers.

Part of what escapes the understanding of the conservative thinkers is that the very notion of critical thought made giant strides out of Karl Marx and Engels in the 19th century as they dissected the nature of Absolute Monarchies as Czarist Russia and ancien regime kingdoms such as the Kaiser-led Germany and the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even in the 20th Century it was the Marxism-inflected Semiotic School that made the greatest in-roads into dissecting the expanding area of mass media. Conservatives in most parts are flag-waving monarchists in any country.

The upshot of all this is that just about every media production course is inflected (or infected, if you like) by a Marxist analysis method in discussing images, sound, meaning and so on. This has led to a situation where most people working in the media who are literate are somewhat left-leaning in their outlook because their critical framework is founded in Marxist thinking. Is this good? I don't know. I'm pretty sure I suffer from it as much as the next person who studied media and communication in my generation. It's a bit of a drag, because I don't necessarily want to be led by my brain to the Left - indeed, it's hard work staying in the middle because the Left always comes armed with words, while the Right always come armed with... arms, it seems.

It is in the very absence of the viable, contemporary 'conservative' frame work by which to analyse texts, events, people that leaves the conservative voice left out of these discourses - and let's face it, even the notion of a discourse comes out of heavily Marxist French contemporary philosophy. What chance has the Right really got if it has lost the ability to argue from Hobbs and Hume, while the boffins of the Left keep coming up with new-fangled ways to deconstruct (there's another beautiful Marxist-inflected term) phenomena. Simply put, the Right side of politics is lacking in any kind of vocabulary that can viably and ably present a critique. Marshall McLuhan's work is nice, but it can't withstand the volume of words invested in the French-Philosophy-derived critical discourses.

You sort of have to go back to Immanuel Kant to start a critique without Marx, but for the two facts:
1) Kant's critique of Pure Reason is a heck of difficult book to digest for the average Right wing hack.
2) It's not necessarily going to lead to the sort of conclusions the contemporary right is going to like, any more than the contemporary French philosophy.
In other words, Kant, can't cut it. Not alone, anyway.

In that light, I want to link to this article by Gerard Henderson in the Herald today.

I've lost count of the number of ABC journalists, based in or visiting the United States, who are covering the presidential election. But the number does not really matter since they all seem to be saying much the same thing.

With a few exceptions, Australian commentators are following their American counterparts - they are barracking for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party ticket. It is difficult to recall any other election in a democratic society where the media has been so obviously supporting one side in a two-sided contest.

It is not so much a case of conscious bias as the prevalence of fashion. The US President, George Bush, the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Administration in Washington DC are very unpopular, especially among journalists and commentators.

John McCain has been afflicted by the fact that he is the Republican candidate during the time of an international financial crisis and when the US is involved in an unpopular military commitment in Iraq. More importantly, Senator Obama is a young and charismatic son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, who is promising change, renewal and all that.

Gerard Henderson thinks what his side is up against is 'fashion'. That it is fashionable to adopt Barack Obama as the candidate of choice when there is a man who appeals much more to Gerard in John McCain, and that is why the media is lauding him. I have to say this is a woefully inadequate analysis of the media for the reasons I mentioned above, but we'll go along with it for the moment.

The overwhelming majority of opinion polls suggest a comfortable win for the Obama/Joe Biden ticket. Even so, some pollsters give the Democrats a relatively modest lead of about 5 per cent with a large number of undecided voters. What's missing in much of the reporting is an examination of why the Democratic ticket is not further ahead and what an Obama administration would mean for the US and the rest of the world.

It seems that Obama's inability, so far at least, to win a huge vote turns on the fact that he is the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) candidate to run for president in decades.

This is reflected in his voting record in the US Senate and his past associations with individuals and organisations on the radical left. The list includes the Chicago clergyman the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the self-confessed one-time urban terrorist William Ayers of Weather Underground infamy, and former Palestine Liberation Organisation spokesman Rashid Khalidi.

He sounds like a man who hates conceding defeat but must because the reality is against him; and so he is laying a curse on the reality by blaming media bias. It's understandable. Back in 1996-2000, I found it really hard to stomach the great lurch to the right that saw John Howard get entrenched and George W. Bush come to power, and the 7 years that followed were just painful. And I'm only casually a leftie - a chardonnay socialist who can't stand much chardonnay - I try to stay dead bang in the middle as advocated by the song 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and even then the rise of the right in the last decade had me reaching for my vomit bag. So I imagine Gerard Henderson to be understandably reaching for his vomit bag as the Socialist cause makes a big comeback. It happens to all of us Gerard - dude, your horse is not a bad horse, but it's just getting beaten by a better one. Get over it.

However, if the Right actually had a contemporary philosophical foundation for mounting proper critiques, their jobs at convincing the public against the perceived bias might not be so difficult. That is to say, if the Right were actually a little more intellectually competent and rigorous, instead of stooping to the lows of Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair and Miranda Devine, it might be able to better shape tomorrow without reverting to paternalistic fascist arguments that rightfully (pun intended) garner it such scorn and ridicule.
Go back to Hobbs and Hume, and bring it up to date. Siding with the religious nuts is not going to win the middle where I sit.