While we’re talking about media bias…

By Peter Feaver

I cannot resist making another point about the media coverage. I require my students to read the New York Times (and encourage them also to read the Washington Post) because these papers of record are the best resource for learning what is happening in the world. But I also teach my students to be wise and critical readers of the paper.

Peter Baker’s story today in the Times about the scope of President Obama’s involvement in the daily affairs of the nation provides exactly the sort of teaching moment professors love to exploit. The story is billed as a "news analysis," which means it is not driven by a new discovery or new piece of reporting, but rather driven by people’s (either the editor’s, or the reporter’s, or just other informed commentators’) reactions to a recent big news story.

If spring semester classes weren’t done, I might draw my students’ attention to this story to make three points:

First, beware the unreliability of headlines and the danger of dodgy editors. Headlines are written by editors, not by reporters. In my experience, reporters are often blamed for the mistakes or boneheadedness of editors. The headline given the story — "Obama Brings a Hands-on Style to Details, Grand and Mundane" — is the most positive possible spin to give to the story and spins it in a misleading fashion. The underlying account is really about the vast expansion of government penetration into daily affairs and the dangers associated with that expansion. Baker observes that President Obama seems to relish this expansion, and he also observes that Republicans warned he would do this during the campaign. He does not show that Obama is actually micro-managing the policy, but he does show that Obama is willing to engage in exhortations that sound maternalistic. I can think of many headlines that convey the story better than the one the editors gave, and all of them are a bit less flattering to Obama. That is skew — the editor’s skew, not Baker’s.

Second, notice how Baker, to his credit, draws the oft-ignored parallel between President Bush’s exhortation for Americans to resume shopping after the 9/11 attacks and Obama’s exhortation for Americans to keep their tires properly inflated and to keep their hands properly washed. Baker obliquely suggests that these exhortations may come back to haunt Obama the way they haunted Bush. But just drawing that connection raises the obvious next question: why does the mainstream media mock Bush for what he said and not mock Obama for the same sort of thing?

Third, I would then ask students whether all of those presidential comments were not reasonable responses to the challenges. Bush was dealing with an economy already in recession and with immediate post-9/11 panic about follow-on attacks in malls, not to mention generalized uncertainty. If Americans hunkered down and stopped normal commerce, then the knock-on effects of 9/11 would be far more lasting than the attacks themselves. No serious observer can claim that Bush was saying this is the only thing we needed to do in response to 9/11. But it was a tangible thing that individual Americans (the people he was talking to) could do on their own.

I credit Obama with the same pragmatic realism. He doesn’t think inflating tires is the only thing we need to do to deal with the energy crisis, and he doesn’t think washing our hands is the only thing we need to do to deal with the swine flu burgeoning pandemic. Which only raises the second question once again: why does so much of the mainstream media treat Bush’s remarks as contemptible and the others as unremarkable?

To be clear, there is nothing wrong in Baker’s piece, at least not in the bits he wrote. He is a very good reporter. He was a tough, critical reporter of the White House under Bush, and he seems to be less afflicted with the Obama honeymoon syndrome than other reporters. (And he may believe that even this tempered praise from a former Bush official is a toxic embrace that does him more harm than good!) 

It is a useful teaching device. If students read it thoroughly (and not just read the headlines), and if they read it with questioning and critical eyes, they will learn something and have their curiosity piqued to learn more. But some of what they learn will make them a bit more skeptical about media coverage in general.