Writing about the individuals who hold the “commanding heights of news” earlier this week at the Wall Street Journal, the excellent Gerard Baker described them as having a “philosophical outlook” that “reflects a degree of convergence in their shared metropolitan, expensively educated, narrowly focused minds.” That’s perhaps true, but isn’t it also the point?
Baker thinks not. He entertainingly references longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s (1919-2001) lament about Richard Nixon’s landslide, 1972 re-election that “I know only one person who voted for Nixon.”
Baker contends that Kael’s “Marie Antoinette” view of “how other people live and think has been the biggest problem with what we might continue to call elite news organizations in the past 30 years. It is the primary reason that trust in their reliability as providers of a fair accounting of the news has collapsed.”
Maybe, but not asked enough is what print and television media are supposed to be. Thinking about the New York Times, does anyone reading this think the Times would enjoy better circulation and trust if it had a right lean?
More than most on the right care to admit, the Times’s left slant is a business decision. Consider the city that it nominally is about, but also its national readership. To say that those who read it generally swing left is a waste of words, thus the makeup of its columnist/reporter pool.
Which arguably answers the initial question. Assuming the Times took a right turn, it’s no insight to suggest that more than a few of its lefty readers would cancel their subscriptions. And it’s not much less of a reach to speculate that new, right-wing subscribers wouldn’t make up for the loss of frequently well-to-do, left leaning readers. It’s possible we’ll soon enough have market evidence to support the previous assertion, or not.
That's because the Washington Post’s editorial page has taken an unmistakable right turn. Eventually this will affect readership, and presumably circulation. Up or down will be very telling.
What about television news shows? The obvious response is that Fox News has done quite well, but as conservatives aren’t afraid to say, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS (hence Bari Weiss’s famous, “Why does the country think you’re biased?” question) lean left. How many viewers does Fox News enjoy relative to the combined viewers of the news shows on the channels mentioned?
The answer seems to indicate that the left in the U.S. watch more television news and read more print media. This isn’t a comment on brains, IQ or common sense, as much as it’s seemingly an empirical reality. Considering the demographics of consumers of print and television media, the answer to Weiss’s question is that the media are biased to meet the needs of their viewers. This likely isn’t lost on Baker.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page writers are openly biased to reflect their market-liberal, culturally conservative audience. And more than Baker would perhaps admit, the Journal's editorial page is similarly populated by “metropolitan, expensively educated” thinkers who wouldn't be that much more comfortable around typical red state Trump voter than their seeming opposites at the Times.
The main thing is that the Journal’s editorial board thinks and writes right to fill a need in the way that the Times, CNN, MSNBC, CBS and others do for the left. No doubt some of the bias reflects the kind of people who go into media, but the more basic reason is one of ratings: there are more left-leaning consumers of print and television news. This is arguably markets at work, which is something Baker should appreciate.
