In the political sphere, press bias toward the politically correct Left and against the morally conservative Right is easy to see - just look at how the press has avoided commenting on the illegal, unjustified, and disastrous military actions taken by the Clinton administration and how these murderous actions were obviously linked to the need to get Clinton's own scandals off the front pages at key moments. Contrasted with the endlessly cynical assumptions about the motives of any action by a Republican president (i.e., every foreign policy move by Reagan and Bush was assumed to have a political motive), the press bias is shamefully obvious. It goes on even now, as Clinton faces disbarment unless he surrenders his law license in Arkansas - if these things were happening to a Republican president, we'd be getting daily coverage of it, but since they're happening to Clinton, you barely know it's going on. But that's the way it is - America is basically a one-newspaper town, and the paper is a tout for the left wing of the Democratic Party. Honorable, decent men like Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Kenneth Starr can tell you what the attack-dog press can do when the truth is made subservient to a cause.
Just as perilous to our country's moral and intellectual health, though, is the coverage of "nonpolitical" matters. We're getting what amounts to a relentless propaganda campaign in favor of limitless abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and hate-crime laws, while the press turns a blind eye to such matters as the judicial usurpation of democracy, the shattering of the first amendment, and the connection between the "sexual revolution" and the horrible social problems that only arose after divorce, abortion, and extramarital sex became socially and legally acceptable.
Most embarrassing is the intellectually shameful coverage of science. Studies that seem to support the gay agenda, for instance, are blasted in headlines all over America; when the study turns out to be bad science or grossly misinterpreted, the corrections, when they appear at all, are buried in the back pages. In my town, we were recently treated to the results of a study that compared first-rate but expensive daycare with informal or understaffed and underfunded daycare. All the headlines proclaimed, "Study Shows Children Do Better in High-Quality Daycare." You could look at those headlines and read the articles and come away with the strong impression that high-quality daycare was better than parental care at home, even though the study did not even address that question.
The science coverage is equally stupid when it comes to environmental issues. "Global warming" is treated as if it were proven that it is happening, that it is harmful, and that it is caused by human activities, even though there is still no trustworthy evidence demonstrating any of these three points. As for the ozone hole being caused by chlorofluorocarbons, the evidence for this remains exactly zero, and in fact there is now evidence that the ozone hole existed before chlorofluorocarbons were in widespread use.
Yet we are making public policy based on phony science as reported in the press, instead of science that has actually produced reliable and reproducible results. Why? Because any "science" story that advances the agenda of the forces of social revolution is treated as exciting truth by the press, while science stories that cast doubt on that social revolution are ignored or treated with contempt. Is this a "conspiracy" of the press? I doubt it. It would be hard to imagine any conspiracy flourishing in the viciously competitive world of journalism. No, this bias is merely an accurate reflection of the values of the community that reporters and editors live in.
Why has the American press become so uniform? Partly it comes from the fact that American universities and intellectual journals embraced uniformity decades ago by carefully controlling hiring, tenure, and peer review. "Diversity" is only a virtue when it can be used to get rid of traditional values. Moral conservatives are completely shut out. My Mormon friends in family studies, for instance, uniformly report that in order to get their doctorates and get hired by universities, they had to conceal their religious and moral views and pay lip service to the politically correct agenda. In other words, the reason why university intellectuals all seem to support the social revolution is not because it is based on truth, but because you can't get hired unless you go along.
This had a "trickle-down" effect on the news media because reporters and broadcasters are prey to the fear that people will discover that they are not actually intellectuals themselves. They have learned that if they utter the same opinions and attitudes as the certified intellectuals, they can pass for smart.
Perhaps more tellingly, in the past forty years the entrance requirements to the press community have radically changed. Gone are the days when reporters were a rough-and-tumble crew that started out running errands in the newsroom and worked their way up by hard work, an eye for news, and (sometimes) good writing. Nowadays you can't get through the door of a newspaper personnel office without at least a bachelor's degree in journalism - and that means that you have to get four years of passing grades from professors who were hired and given tenure by committees ruled by the politically correct. (The same is true in colleges of education, where our nation's elementary and secondary teachers are trained, but that's another story.)
In short, the social revolutionaries control the gate through which all reporters must pass. And while a few moral conservatives manage to sneak through, by the time they get onto a newspaper they know to keep their heads down.
The solution is not to hire kneejerk Rightists to counter the kneejerk Leftists - adding idiots from column B does not improve much on the idiocy of column A. The solution is for reporters to learn and use the ethic of rigor to which they give lip service even now, and to keep their minds open to the possibility that the people who disagree with them might be right. Stories like the bogus "report" that wife-abuse peaks on SuperBowl Sunday should never have been given any play at all - it was easy to check and find out that it had no basis whatsoever. If reporters and editors did their job instead of eagerly accepting anything that affirms the current intellectually orthodox worldview, the American people might actually get some correct information now and then.
I'm dreaming, of course. Because who is there to exert pressure on the press to be rigorous with their own reporting? The only pressure they respect comes from their peers and from the intellectual establishment. There is no shame in slanting the story toward political correctness because no one notices the slant, or if they do, it is praised. Thus the "free" press has far too often used its monolithic power to embrace a lie and shut inconvenient truth out of the debate.
