Bias In The News: Blame It On Their Zip Code

For years, journalists have bristled at allegations of liberal bias in the news. “If you think we have a bias,” some of them would say, “that only proves one thing: that you’re the one with the bias.” When my book Bias came out at the end of 2001 –despite a surprisingly good review in the New York Times – so-called mainstream reporters generally denounced the book. “Liberal bias?” they asked incredulously. “What liberal bias?” A few even called me a “traitor” for supposedly turning on my colleagues, which is kind of funny since these are people who won’t call a real traitor … a traitor.

Well, now we have Chuck Todd, political director and chief White House correspondent at NBC News, breaking ranks (sort of) with his fellow journalists. In an interview with Politico, Todd says, “To me, the ideological bias in the media really hasn’t been there in a long time. But what is there that people mistake for ideological bias is geographic bias. It’s seeing everything through the lens of New York and Washington.”

Not really, but it’s good that Chuck Todd at least seems to be acknowledging that there was, once upon a time an ideological bias in the mainstream media. To say it “hasn’t been there in a long time,” acknowledges that it was there, once. This is something a lot of journalists would never admit.

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