Accuracy in the Media’s Cliff Kincaid recently joined the Center for Individual Freedom’s Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino on the radio program “Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense” to discuss media bias and how it has become more blatant. The interview aired on WEBY 1330AM Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.
What follows are excerpts from the interview.
GIACHINO: Joining me this afternoon is Cliff Kincaid of the organization Accuracy in the Media. Cliff serves as the editor of AIM Report, and he is a veteran journalist and media critic. The organization takes on the undaunting task of trying to make sure that our news media reports the news rather than its own opinions on the news. Accuracy in the Media is a non-profit, grassroots citizens’ watchdog of the news media. They are the first to offer criticism of botched and bungled news stories.
Cliff, thank you for joining us this afternoon.
KINCAID: It is great to be with you this afternoon.
GIACHINO: If you would please give us a little more information and some of the history about Accuracy in the Media?
KINCAID: AIM is the oldest media watchdog group. We have been in existence for over 35 years. I have been associated with AIM for about 25 years, now as the editor of the AIM Report. We critique the media through commentaries, our Media Monitor radio shows, our weekly columns, our twice per month newsletter and we take the unique approach of taking out stock in the major news media companies so we can go to the annual meetings and question the top brass. We just did that at the meeting of Gannett. My associate, Sherry Gossett, was just at the annual meeting of The New York Times just today.
GIACHINO: Does the news media really not report the news fairly and objectively?
KINCAID: Well that is unfortunately the case and I discovered this myself personally when I took journalism in college. I graduated with a degree in journalism and communications. My college textbook, and we are talking about 30 years ago, was called Interpretive Reporting. So they don’t teach objective news reporting any more, Renee, it is just “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “how,” and “so what.” This means that the news is interpretive within the context of the values of the news reporter. And because most reporters going back for decades come into journalism from a liberal perspective, that is the kind of bias we get through the big media.
GIACHINO: Do you think that we are at fault in today’s technological age? I mean, we want the news now, we want it fast and we don’t want details. So in some respects we shoulder some of the blame because we don’t require or demand some of the same investigative reporting that was once a standard in the reporting industry. Would you agree with that?
KINCAID: I think that has been the case. But I think increasingly people are coming to the realization that the burden is really on you and me to determine the truth — we cannot just sit in front of the TV and watch Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather. We have to expand our sources of knowledge and information and we have to compare and contrast and we have to find reliable sources.
Journalism is a funny business. I am going to be participating this week at an event in Washington at the National Press Club and the first question that is going to be put to the panel is “what is a journalist?” Well, you know, journalism is a profession where there is no real definition. We are not licensed like real estate agents or doctors; we don’t get government licenses so really anyone can become a journalist, especially in this day and age. That is why the burden is being passed to the news consumer who in many cases can become a journalist him or herself.
GIACHINO: There are a lot of people who don’t believe or don’t want to believe that the media is biased, and it takes people like you, Cliff Kincaid, a journalist yourself, or Bernard Goldberg, who was on this show recently — folks from within the industry to voice this and to point out to the rest of us that, yes, in fact, there is media bias. One of the things that I talked about with Bernard was how if you pick up your daily newspaper and just read it line by line by line, you can circle words in about every sentence that are superfluous to the actual story but they do in fact set a tone or bias. Would you agree?
KINCAID: Oh, no question. I will give you one recent example that we are on top of. It involves the controversy over John Bolton, the President’s nominee to the U.N. Ambassador position. Stories appeared in the press yesterday about a new person who is accusing John Bolton of being mean to her about 20 years ago, having yelled at her. This woman is being presented in the media as just some former employee of the Agency of International Development, somebody who knew John Bolton and is now coming up with these really serious allegations. I just bothered to do a basic elementary Google or website search on this lady and discovered that she is involved in the subject of recovered memories and self-hypnosis. She is a new age spiritualist who has gotten teachings from yoga and Hindu teachers and claims to be able to create her own reality.
The bottom line is that none of this context or information was included in the stories presenting her as some kind of authoritative source on John Bolton, and yet it did not take me long to dig out the facts. I did contact her personally and she said she did not want to comment because she is going to be interviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But I did send an e-mail to the USA Today, Ken Paulson, saying “Ken, why didn’t you bother to do any kind of elementary checking into who this woman really is?” And his response is, “Well, Cliff, we are checking into it and we will get back to you.”
That is the kind of thing that we at AIM do almost every day, and who knows how many people have been misled or confused by these charges against Bolton, not knowing the context or background of the person making them.
GIACHINO: Why is it that if this bias is so pervasive — which I think you and I would agree that it is — how can members of the press continue to keep getting away with it?
KINCAID: Well, you know, increasingly they are not. You know the brouhaha over Dan Rather and the Rathergate controversy shows the power of new media — talk radio, the bloggers and even the rest of the media who got on top of that story are able to make the media pay. In that case, some people were either fired or let go by CBS News. But obviously that was a major scandal, a big issue, and there are literally dozens of cases of erroneous stories that get by, that never get corrected.
But I think that increasingly we are seeing some progress. But no doubt about it, some reporters figure they can get away with sloppy and biased journalism and many of them do so.
GIACHINO: What can the average American who cares about this issue and who is fed up with media bias — whether it’s Dan Rather or their local news reporter — what can and should they do to try to combat media bias?
KINCAID: Certainly they should listen to show like this. I am sure you are happy to hear that, but the truth is that talk radio is one of the alternative media that do serve as a check on the power of the mainstream or big media, the broadcast networks and big papers. And cable news, certainly Fox News is succeeding because it has alternative news and information. And the bloggers are having an impact.
Basically, the bottom line for the average news consumer is to search out alternative sources of information — talk radio, cable news, obviously AIM.org, where you can sign up for our daily e-mail updates. I know that it is time consuming and that a lot of people out there are very busy and they don’t have a lot of time, but find a couple of good sources that you trust that you can go to on a regular basis, maybe even daily, to get the complete picture.
GIACHINO: You know just earlier I had Byron York on the program to talk about his new book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, and in the book he writes about how a gentleman had hired monitors to sit and watch Fox television to try to make a claim that Fox television was in the pocket of the Republican Party and that it has its own media bias. I think a lot of people have said that over time. What is your opinion of Fox News?
KINCAID: Well, you would have to look at the particular show. Certainly I think that Brit Hume and his hour long evening news program have a conservative tilt. I don’t think we can deny that. I don’t think that he would deny that. But, on the other hand, some of the other shows are different. Bill O’Reilly — I have been on his show several times, including arguing with him — he is not necessarily a conservative, and he takes different views on things. Greta’s show I don’t think is ideologically conservative.
But you know people have to remember this — when you talk about Fox News, although it is successful and Bill O’Reilly has the most popular show on cable news, at best he gets three or four million viewers per night. But that is not too many in a country this big. In fact, although the evening news programs have been losing viewers, the three major news programs are still getting about 28 million per night and the morning news shows get about 15 million. The major papers — The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today — have circulations totaling 4 or 5 million. So those who are deciding to zero in on Fox News as the so-called big media are really making a political point themselves — that they don’t want conservative voices to be gathering steam.
GIACHINO: And wouldn’t you agree, Cliff, that there is a difference when you turn on a program that you know has a political agenda or tilt, you understand that, but you don’t expect and should not get such tilt from your news program, whether it is national or local news programming? You should be able to get the news without bias.
KINCAID: That’s right, and that has been our main gripe over the years with the liberal media is that they just won’t admit it — they masquerade. And that is what is so enlightening to me when I came through journalism school and saw that my college textbook was called “Interpretive Reporting.” The fact is that Walter Cronkite never gave us the news the way that it is. It was biased back then and it is biased now.
Yet, for the most part, they will not admit it. They want us to believe that somehow this is objective and is being presented without bias. The fact is that they are not being taught that way in journalism school, they don’t present it that way, and so what we have been saying to them is to drop the pretense and just admit it. But they don’t want to do that because if they come out of the closet and admit they have been liberal and have been liberal all along, they are going to lose even more viewers.
GIACHINO: We have a caller on the line. Go ahead caller, it’s your turn.
CALLER: Good afternoon. I am not a member of either party and I see the media for both parties. Both parties have the same people contributing to both, and to me what the media does not do is explain that they are all the same. For instance, with the war you would think that the media is against the war. But they really are not, and they really don’t ask the really difficult questions like “why did Saddam not use weapons of mass destruction if he ever had them?” So I just see that the media — which is owned by six major corporations now — and it is all intertwined with both major parties, and you barely hear anything about the third parties. I would disagree that there is just liberal bias. I think there is corporate bias.
KINCAID: I would say this — in our system, which is a capitalist system, it is bound to be that corporations run the media. That is the epitome and definition of freedom of the press — that old saying that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Now that was a somewhat cynical comment when it was made, but the fact is that in this day and age you can be your own corporation. You can be your own blogger, and you can start your own media company for very little money and you can get your own news and views out there. That means that rather than there being six big corporations that run everything, there is increasing competition not only in the electronic media, broadcast and talk radio, but even in print to some extent. And, as I say, there are media watchdog groups available.
The point is that there is more diversity — I am talking ideological and philosophical diversity — than there ever was, and that is why you are able to raise some the questions and make some of the points that you do. Obviously you have access to alternative sources of information that are out there.
CALLER: I do agree that it is increasing, but not nearly as much as when our country was started. You have been talking about the mainstream media, and I would say with respect to that that there is not liberal or conservative bias, but they are basically for the two big parties — the big money people.
Like this show would be different. I guess I would disagree that there is this liberal bias and not an elite bias.
KINCAID: Well, if you are making the point that some of the liberals in the media, themselves, are elites, then I would agree. Let’s face it, whether you are a conservative or liberal journalist in Washington, D.C., or New York, you are part of the elite. You make good money and are part of the upper-income bracket.
On the other hand, what we have discovered is that those who go into journalism come from the liberal side of the political spectrum. All of the surveys show that the major media — we are talking those based in Washington, D.C., and New York — are more sympathetic with the Democratic Party. Now there are some people who contribute to both and there are some similarities, but there are some differences and we are seeing them being exposed in the daily media today on the subject of judicial nominations and John Bolton. There are real differences, but I would be with you in this respect — I would like to see more coverage by the big media of the third or fourth parties in this country. And cover some of those on the right and left who have not gotten as much attention as they have in the past. So I would like to see that further diversity and give more political dissidents more attention that I think they deserve, as well.
CALLER: Yes, that is what I am talking about. Thank you very much.
KINCAID: Thank you.
GIACHINO: Okay, Cliff we only have a few minutes left and I set up the interview by promising the listeners that we would talk about the United Nations — another pet peeve of mine, just like media bias. You recently came out with a new press release that exposes a pro-U.N. film as Hollywood propaganda. If you will, please tell the listeners what you are talking about with respect to the movie The Interpreter?
KINCAID: Well, this movie just came out and it was filmed in cooperation with the U.N. The basic plot involves as African leader who comes to the U.N. to deliver a speech, and he is the subject of an assassination attempt. But the political context is that, in the end in the film, he is turned over by the U.N. Security Council, including the
GIACHINO: That’s right. So now we have media bias on the big screen. Cliff, thank you very much for your time. I would like to invite you back to talk more about the U.N. and media bias.
KINCAID: Thank you. I would be happy to come back.
GIACHINO: Thank you very much. We were visiting with Cliff Kincaid of the organization Accuracy in the Media. You can visit AIM’s website at www.aim.org.
June 9, 2005