Evan Thomas in Newsweek: "Is the mainstream press unbiased? No, but we aren't ideological. What we really thrive on is conflict..."
"The mainstream media (the "MSM" the bloggers love to rail against) are prejudiced, but not ideologically. The press's real bias is for conflict. Editors, even ones who marched in antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era, have a weakness for war, the ultimate conflict. Inveterate gossips and snoops, journalists also share a yen for scandal, preferably sexual. But mostly they are looking for narratives that reveal something of character. It is the human drama that most compels our attention.
Politicians have long known how to go over the heads of the press to the public. Had the voting franchise been restricted to reporters, neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would have been elected president. Much of the Fourth Estate regarded Nixon as a thinly packaged autocrat, Reagan as a dumb nuclear cowboy. Both presidents were re-elected in landslides. Old media's political power, such as it was, has been weakened further by new media. The fund-raising power and viral reach of the Internet are far more crucial to the fortunes of a presidential candidate than sitting around eating cookies with The Washington Post's editorial board.
The need to sell newspapers or win over advertisers is real and getting more pressing in an age of declining financial fortunes, but such pressures almost never affect news decisions. (If they did, there would be less political or foreign coverage, which is plentiful and is the subject of many of the criticisms leveled at the MSM. Trust us, advertisers are not eager to underwrite coverage of wars, often for fear of being associated with controversial topics.) Anyone visiting the morning meetings of the editors at most newsmagazines, major newspapers or news networks would hear a discussion of what's new, what's interesting and what's important—not what's going to make money for the publisher or owner...
It is true that reporters are susceptible to flash and charm; like most cynics, they are romantics in disguise. JFK and the early Bill Clinton were bound to get better press than insecure Richard Nixon or earnest Al Gore (who for some reason hides a raucous sense of humor). Right now, Obama and John McCain are popular with reporters. But if the usual laws of press physics apply, the media will turn on both men before Election Day. The blogs and the talk-show hosts will rant. The voters will take it all in (or not). And then make up their own minds."
I think this article hits on a crucial point. The manipulators of the media understand this bias toward conflict, and they manufacture it when necessary to lure the press toward certain issues. Much like the point Goering made before his suicide, our obsession with conflict (driven fundamentally by our fear of being attacked) makes us vulnerable to manipulation like this. And it motivates us to watch TV, watch the news, get behind a candidate, etc.
Many of us in the resolution business understand well the pathologies of conflict, we need to be aware of its seductive elements as well.