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Let’s talk about media bias and Afghanistan. Because this is a really good case study of how real media bias works.
I’ll start with an excellent column from my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, in which he supplies eight reasons why President Joe Biden is getting terrible press over the events in Afghanistan. He’s pushing back against Biden’s defenders and opponents of U.S. involvement who have argued that the media are actively cheerleading for war, or perhaps punishing Biden for not continuing the fight.
Ponnuru points out that ideological bias isn’t necessary for explaining how Afghanistan is being covered, because other media biases were triggered. So for example (as he points out) a situation where the president’s party is split while the out-party is united against a policy generally yields negative coverage for the president. In this case, the terrible events were also happening where the cameras happened to be in Kabul, which produced heavy coverage, while the same media — especially TV — had almost invariably ignored much heavier violence for years because it was happening far from where the press was based.
All of this is perfectly typical of real media bias. As are the reactions. When bias runs against Republicans, they assume that the reason is partisan or ideological, which might make sense given that the majority of journalists tend to be liberal. When, as in this case, it runs against Democrats, they’re quick to note the corporate ownership of media outlets and their sponsors.
But political scientists and other scholars who have studied this topic invariably find that within the explicitly neutral media the biases that matter are almost always related to the way that journalists go about their jobs; the values of neutrality they try to uphold; and, to be sure, self-interest, such as paying more attention to stories that attract readers and viewers.
Remember, bias is inevitable. Choices must be made about what to cover and how to interpret it, and there are no purely fair answers for how to make those decisions or uncontroversial standards to refer to. At least beyond those that the “neutral” media uses. That doesn’t mean that the media shouldn’t be criticized, or can’t get stories wrong.
As for the accusation that there’s a general bias in favor of hawkishness? What I think we’re seeing is a “mainstream” bias — that is, the neutral media considers some views mainstream and others not, and feels free to dismiss the latter. What I think really angers a lot of Biden’s defenders is that certain hawkish viewpoints — and the pundits pushing them — have survived U.S. use of torture, the fiasco in Iraq and now the futility of the last years in Afghanistan without managing to be disqualified from the mainstream. And that certainly has affected coverage of these events.
For the most part, however, I think that’s less a media story than it is a party story. Republicans (with the occasional exception of Donald Trump) haven’t moved on from the ideas that forged George W. Bush’s policies or the people who advanced them. And there’s always been a faction of Democrats who either stood with them or at least near them (a faction that has withered but hasn’t disappeared). It’s not necessarily correct for the media to keep classifying those people and ideas as mainstream, but that’s generally how it’s done. For better or worse.
1. Rowan McGarry-Williams, Noah Kim, Deanna Han and Sara Sadhwani at the Monkey Cage on redistricting.
2. Justin Gest on demography and the new census.
3. Seth Masket on Afghanistan and upcoming U.S. elections.
4. Sarah Katz on access to the ballot for people with disabilities.
5. And Perry Bacon Jr. on what Democrats are doing about election law in states where they have majorities.
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August 26, 2021 at 06:30PM
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Afghanistan Shows Real Media Bias at Work - Bloomberg
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