MediaWatch: July 1993
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: July 1993
- The Most Common Politically Motivated Statistical Exaggerations
- NewsBites: Conservative Corporations?
- Revolving Door: City Hall Calling
- Reporters Insist Budget is Half Tax Hikes, Half Cuts
- Globe Concedes Liberal Tilt
- Limousine Liberals
- nsists No 'Left-Liberal Line' in Essays
- Janet Cooke Award: Discovery Channel Series Starts Out As Slanted As CBS
Globe Concedes Liberal Tilt
Toned Down Bias?
The sale of The Boston Globe to the New York Times Company shook the newspaper industry. It also prompted an equally startling admission from the Globe: liberal bias permeates its news stories. In a June 13 story reviewing the Globe's history, reporter Charles Stein wrote that the Globe is "a paper that has become known -- not always fondly -- as a champion of liberal causes and social justice." Since Editor Tom Winship's 1984 retirement, Stein found "Business coverage has expanded; so has coverage of the arts. And most readers would agree that the Globe's liberal bias has been toned down in news stories."
Toned down? The headline over a Dec. 28, 1989 "Living" section review of the 1980s read: "The decade had its highs (Gorbachev, Bird) and the decade had its lows (Reagan, AIDS)." An October 2, 1990 front page story by Stein on the 1990 budget deal began: "The tax package hammered out last weekend continues a Washington policy established in the Reagan era: It takes a heavy bite out of the paychecks of working class Americans."
In a news story last August 18, during the Republican convention, Curtis Wilkie wrote: "Bush, the exponent of a `kinder, gentler' approach to government at the 1988 convention, was presented with a 1992 platform loaded with puritanical, punitive language that not only forbade abortions but attacked public television, gun control, homosexual rights, birth control clinics and the distribution of clean needles for drug users."
The morning after Bill Clinton's win with 43 percent, Wilkie asserted in a front page piece: "Bill Clinton called for change, but he never dared ask for a mandate as sweeping as the one he received last night. The magnitude of the Democratic triumph was so enormous that it ensures Clinton a strong alliance with Congress and an incentive to move quickly on his domestic programs. Clinton marched to victory in state after state."
In a March 26 news story this year, reporter Peter Gosselin declared: "Clinton has managed to dethrone Reagan's soaring vision of lower taxes as the national cure-all, and replaced it with a more pedestrian ideal, that of paying the nation's bills on time." It's good to know the bias has been "toned down."
