The Myth of Objectivity

She tried to make a joke of it. At the debate in Cleveland last week, Hillary Clinton brought up a "Saturday Night Live" skit about journalists fawning over Barack Obama at a mock debate. "Maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow," said Clinton. Humor is often a substitute for anger, and if Clinton wasn't all that funny, maybe it is because she is sore at the press for seeming to go easier on her opponent. She has a point, but the truth about the media and the campaign cannot be caricatured simply as the deification of Obama and the hounding of Clinton.

The pols and the people invest the press with great power. Conspiracies abound. Right-wing talk-show hosts love to go on about the liberal media establishment. Lefty commentators accuse the press of rolling over for George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq. Politicians of all stripes accuse the press of being unfair, even cruel. Sometimes we are. On the day Vice President George H.W. Bush announced for the presidency in October 1987, he watched as his 28-year-old daughter, Doro, wept when she picked up NEWSWEEK's cover story that week, picturing Bush driving his speedboat under the cover line FIGHTING THE 'WIMP FACTOR.' Bush was, understandably, furious. The phrase "wimp factor" came from Bush's own pollster, and we said he was fighting it, but we nevertheless left the impression that we were calling the vice president a wimp. In the end, the story had little impact because voters already understood that Bush, a World War II hero, was plenty tough. He was elected president the next year.

Certainly, there are editors and publishers who would like to be kingmakers, or just kings. From William Randolph Hearst to Henry Luce to Rupert Murdoch, press barons have sought to leave their personal stamp, if not change the course of history. But for the vast majority of media, the reality is much more mundane; the press's impact on elections, as well as most other human events, is murky.

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.