Zohrab on Media Bias

Peter Zorhab from the NZ Equality Party sent in another article on media bias. In this piece, he focuses more broadly on the influece of left-wing politics and the struggle men's issues has in getting airtime in this environment. Whether your politics are left or right, his points provoke a lot of thought on this issue.

Left-Wing Media Bias

Copyright 2002 by Peter Douglas Zohrab (zohrab@xtra.co.nz)

Reprinted with permission from the author

The Problem

How can it be that someone like Peter Mulhern can pen the following words:

"The biases of the elite media are too well documented to make good column
fodder. Most journalists have a tribal attachment to the Democrat Party that
transcends even ideology" (
http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm
),

while (as at 18 May 2002) the page
http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html
(on a Media Studies site) treats media bias as if only right-wing media bias
existed ? Surely they live in different worlds ?

The media and education systems (the Media-University Complex) in Western
countries have the ideological cohesiveness and mass coverage to create
"reality", and then to go out and "discover" it, to research it, and to report
it. They create reality by seeking out left-wing, Feminist, and ethnic etc.
extremists and giving them the same, or more, coverage as/than mainstream
organizations, and refusing to give first-person coverage (fair interviews)
to right-wing extremists, Pro-Life activists, and Men's/Fathers' groups,
etc.. Over time, this moves the criterion of "mainstream" inexorably to the
left.

Meanwhile, the real reality is simmering away below the surface of reported
events. On the rare occasions when it attempts to burst out into public
consciousness (e.g. when the Right are doing well in the polls), the media
do their best to sweep it back under the carpet by means of scare-mongering,
libel, and selective reporting. It is really only talk-back radio and the
Internet that give people the freedom to bypass Left-Wing media censorship
and propaganda.

The media are frequently attacked by "Right-Wing" critics -- not for the
bias of the owners of the media (which is relatively minor in scale), but
for the bias of the media workers (journalists, in particular). For example,
in 2002 media coverage of French Right-Wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen
and the Dutch political assassinee, Forteyn, most journalists were blatantly
and openly one-sided, as if the media were a left-wing political party (which,
in practice, they are). The media see right-wing extremism as the problem,
whereas in fact left-wing media bias forces moderate Right-Wingers into
extremism, because the media prevents them from having equal access to the
public.

Right-Wing populists are bound to be critical of media bias, because they
attract most of it - names such as Rush Limbaugh and Richard Nixon, in the
USA, and Robert Muldoon and Winston Peters, in New Zealand, spring to my
mind immediately. The website
http://www.mrc.org is solely given over
to the publicizing of Left-Wing media bias. The webpage
http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm,
referring to an event involving Lyndon Johnson that was "news" to me, states:

"Nothing Richard Nixon was ever accused of in connection with Watergate posed
as great a threat to the integrity of the American political process as the
crime Lyndon Johnson committed in James Reston's presence. But Johnson was
a Democrat. He could rely on Reston to ignore his crime. He could also rely
on Newsweek to continue ignoring it 35 years later."

Though the Fathers' Movement is, at long last, starting to get a little bit
of media coverage, any activist in the broader Men's Movement can testify
to anti-male, Feminist bias in the media. See
http://members.tripod.com/peterzohrab/marclepi.html
, for example.

Media Power

People often say things like "Knowledge is Power" or "Information is Power,"
but they seldom seem to realize this applies to politics as well as to everything
else. The Media - particularly before the advent of the Internet - controlled
information. This seems to have gone to their heads, in many cases. Some
media people have acquired star status, which is an indication of their power
over people's minds. They are not aware of their own bias.

The news media are very powerful, as Goebbels knew. He was aware of the need
to conceal the "art" of the media professional from the audience by using
historical analogies rather than making blatant political propaganda. Similarly,
the modern western media propagandizes by choosing what to cover and what
questions to ask, rather than by being blatantly biased in the presentation
of what it does cover - usually, at any rate. The problem for politically
incorrect causes such as Men's Rights has been how to get covered at all.

The Sociology Problem

There is a standard, Left-Wing bias that prevails in Universities, but I
will not discuss that topic here - except with reference to the field of
Sociology. See my book, "Sex, Lies & Feminism" (
http://members.tripod.com/peterzohrab/contents.html ) for further details.

The problem of Left-Wing media bias is best understood as pertaining to the
field of the Sociology of the Media. However, Sociology is itself known to
be a Left-Wing bastion - so much so that I once received an email from a
man, asking me about Men's Rights, and apologizing for the fact that he was
a Sociology student and therefore likely to be hostile to Men's Rights !

For example, a quick search of the World Wide Web for "Sociology of the Media"
(or something similar) yielded the following top results:

• 
  The City University, London, which showed no sign of any interest in the
  sociology of media personnel in their extensive course-offering;
  
• 
  The "Equality Studies Centre" of University College Dublin, which has a course
  on "Sociology of the Media and Equality", taught by a woman, amidst a raft
  of other optional courses, which are virtually all taught by women, and include
  "gender", "sexualities", and "women" - but not "men", needless to say;
  
• 
  The personal page of a female lecturer at the University of New Brunswick,
  who has so far taught "Sociology of the Media" along with "Introduction to
  Women's Studies";
  
• 
  Hope College, which gave no detailed information;
  
• 
  New School University, which has a course "Fundamentals of Sociology of Media",
  which refers to the media as being "a constitutive element in the power structure
  of capitalist societies", but shows no sign of investigating the role of
  the employees of media entities;
  
• 
  A University of Essex gateway to resources about the Sociology of the Media;
  
• 
  The University of New Brunswick, which does not give much information about
  the content of courses;
  
• 
  The University of Limerick, which has a course on "Sociology of the Media",
  which includes "media representation of women" (but probably not "media
  representation of men") as one of its topics.
  

None of these show evidence of any interest in researching the role of the
workers in the media industry or men, as such. Their focus seems usually
to be on the owners of the media, as capitalists (i.e. from a Leftist
perspective), on the effects of the media on Society, and/or on Feminist
perspectives on the media.

Conclusion

Far from being mere observers and reporters, the media are powerful and active
players in the political process. One example is the well-known Feminist
author, Susan Faludi. According to Laura Taflinger,

"Faludi thinks a journalist's job is to create social change by educating
people and taking the time to investigate things. A journalist needs to be
passionate about a cause, she says." (
http://www.dnai.com/~ljtaflin/FEMJOUR/faludi.html
)

Since they control the actual perception of political reality of billions
of people, the media have to choose between tidying up their act and becoming
increasingly a target of political violence.

NOTICE: This story was migrated from the old software that used to run Mensactivism.org. Unfortunately, user comments did not get included in the migration. However, you may view a copy of the original story, with comments, at the following link:

http://news.mensactivism.org/articles/02/06/07/2157228.shtml