The Liberal Media

UPDATED

MSNBC finally confirms what conservatives have always known.

Whether you sample your news feed from ABC or CBS (or, yes, even NBC and MSNBC), whether you prefer Fox News Channel or National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, some of the journalists feeding you are also feeding cash to politicians, parties or political action committees.

MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

Marc Ambinder frets:

This list of journalists and their political contributions is kind of embarassing for those of us who argue that our profession is learning to distance ourselves from our political attachments.

I still believe that accusations of "liberal bias" are too simplistic, but it's going to hard to argue with those who see differently.

** I'm not a liberal, but you get the idea.

Actually, I don't get the idea.

The fact that a majority of journalists questioned donated to Democratic politicians does not suggest liberal media bias in any substantive way. Absent any objective proof that these journalists' work is compromised by their political inclinations, proof which the MSNBC story does not present, the claim of bias remains what it has always been - an emotional argument that "liberals" in the media are out to destroy Republicans and conservatives. This argument tends to be "supported" by "evidence" which consists of negative press coverage of Republican politicians.

For example, conservatives reflexively and consistently dismiss coverage of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping (to pick just one of its lawbreaking practices) as evidence of "liberal bias" without ever explaining exactly what they mean by that. In today's political/media environment, merely exposing or opposing Bush's policies is enough to get you labeled a "liberal" or a "leftist." It has no meaning beyond that.

The fact that journalists have political preferences does not constitute by itself a legitimate indictment against them. Ambinder makes no attempt at demonstrating with evidence, or even with a logical argument, that journalists who lean Democratic are not distancing themselves professionally from their "political attachments."

Frankly, the MSNBC list does not make it any harder or easier to win an argument with people who scream about liberal media bias. Those people are not open to persuasion. One of the pillars of their ideology is that the establishment media are biased against them and their political movement. There is no evidence capable of convincing them otherwise. They can't even hear it above the sounds of their own screams.

The list will ricochet through the right-wing echo chamber for a few days (or weeks, or months), and give conservative talk show hosts and bloggers something to crow about. But in the end, they will be no more certain of liberal media bias than they were before the list came out. They take it, as they always have and as they will continue to do, an article of faith.

UPDATE

Ambinder's blogging colleague at The Atlantic, Matt Yglesias, writes:

More to the point, for any given journalist, one either does or does not have legitimate complaints with the work. If you do, the complaint itself is sufficient. If you don't, the revelation that the author of some excellent piece of work also gave $250 to the DSCC in 2005 is neither here nor there.