Are The Media Biased? What Is Media Bias

I've been holding off on this post for a while, because it's awfully interesting and deserves more than the cursory comment I can provide in between classes.

To wit, at Crooked Timber [i.e. the best non-porn site ever--ed.], John Holbo writes a philosophical mini-treatise on the nature of media bias, the reasons that conservatives are so often wont to complain of it, and possible remedies. I'll refrain from trying to summarize any further, simply because this piece needs to be read in full. I will however, excerpt these money grafs:

Suppose it were suggested that a Free Market of Ideas is guaranteed sufficiently by free speech guarantees. Well, obviously this isn’t enough for most conservative complainers about media bias, who know they’ve already got the First Amendment. (I’m setting aside screwballs who think Kerry wants to take away Bibles.) What conservatives think they should get is equal representation on the evening news and the editorial page. (Never mind for the moment whether they are unreasonable not to notice they’ve already got it.) But why should Republicans be represented, let alone equally? Isn’t a demand to have one’s voice not just not muzzled but broadcast an unconscionable prejudgment of the operation of the invisible hand of the free market? If it turns out that 89% of journalists are Democrats (I think I saw that figure, which was not accompanied by any statistic about how many CEO’s of media corporations are Republicans) - if most journalists are Democrats, why should this be regarded as proof of Democratic bias, rather than proof that truth itself is biased against Republicans, since the market rejects them? Obviously the response will run: this market isn’t fair. Which may be fair enough. But there’s that word again, ‘fair’. If a market should be not just free but ‘fair’, what sense of justice helps us understand what ‘fair’ means? Economically, we understand that a free market is supposed to be optimal for the production of wealth and acceptable for its distrubition. But what is a free market in ideas - a Media Market of Ideas - supposed to optimize: truth? The trouble with saying the market of ideas is supposed to optimize truth, and then complaining about partisanship as an obstacle, is that you must decide whether one partisan perspective is ‘truer’ than the other. If yes, then partisanship is actually what the market should aim at, not avoid. If not, then partisanship is not obviously a hindrance to truth. (Think about it. No really, this isn’t sophistry.)

It is plausible what people really think should be optimized is not the production of truths but the expression of belief (and not because this mix conduces to truth but as an end in itself). A range of beliefs. A suitable, representative range of beliefs. The thought is that everyone has a right not just to get the truth from the media but to have their ‘truth’ (i.e. belief) heard by others. The media ought to ‘sound like’ America. But unless this thought is accompanied by a relativistic belief that all beliefs are equally valid, we are now heading away from a free market, not towards it. The idea that everyone is entitled to equal representation in the media is akin to the economic proposition that everyone should be guaranteed about the same amount of money, which is not notably Hayekian. The sense of ‘fairness’ in play here is at least Rawlsian, if not positively communistic. Its doxastic affirmative action. You make sure no one is left behind, is silenced, unheard, excluded. Proper distribution of the media pie is more important, maybe, than ‘growing’ the pie.