In the comment thread to my Choosing Day post, I responded to a reader by saying, in part:
“In the weeks leading up to Nov 4th, I’d see polls on the internet that consistently showed Obama winning the electoral count with considerably over 300 votes to McCain with 170 or so. Yet the media felt a closer race, or the appearance of a closer race, was in its own best interest, and kept pushing the notion that the two candidates were neck to neck.”
Throughout the month of October, as Obama’s lead in the polls widened, some in the media seized on contrary and outlying polls showing stronger support for McCain, at one point reporting a one-percent difference between the candidates. I sensed that the media felt it was in their own interest to report the race as being closer than it was, but why? For their corporate sponsors, by attracting more readers, viewers, and listeners? At the direction of conservative owners, who subscribe to the Bush administration’s belief that empire can create its own reality? Or was it simply the desire to appear balanced?
More and more, I think balance drives the train. Corporate sponsors and conservative owners want balance; reporters self-censor to help create it. I heard the evolutionist Richard Dawkins say on NPR that he’d turned down several mainstream media interview requests because the producers wanted to pair him with some prominent creationist or other, by way of balance . . . thus creating in the minds of listeners and viewers the impression that the evolution versus creationism question is a toss-up, a 50/50 proposition.
But it’s not balance for its own sake they’re after. They’re after avoiding controversy. They’re after not bringing trouble down upon themselves. They’re after not stirring up those who oppose reality. Paul Krugman said it best:
“The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that’s partly because there’s a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn’t like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column — in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally — was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: ‘Shape of Earth — Views Differ.’ Then they’d quote some Democrats saying that it was round.”
Word.