WHAT'S YOUR DEFINITION OF BIAS?

If you've been following the goings-on at the Santa Barbara News-Press over the last year, you know that Wendy McCaw loves to state that the 50 journalists who have quit or been fired were forced to leave due to the fact that Wendy herself is on a mission to purge "bias" from the paper. During the first few months following "Black Thursday," Ms. McCaw would constantly point to the Mori Survey, which suggests a majority of News-Press readers think the paper contains some sort of bias. More recently, Wendy has been referencing a PBS Frontline series called News War. In her latest rant against Lou Cannon, she states the following ...

The PBS series evidences the distrust the public has today for your formerly sacred "journalists." It does not trust them for the very reason I deemed it necessary to take action to ensure that the news was reported fairly and accurately: Your brand of reporters write what they want, when they want. That is not good journalism. That is not in keeping with the tenants of fairness and integrity. Simply put, that is the reason changes were needed at the News-Press.

This statement is, of course, absurd coming from a woman who prints front page articles force feeding the reader her point of view but never EVER posts anything critical of the NP. But others much smarter than myself have covered this ground already, so I'm not going to do it here. Rather, I would like to discuss what I, and others, believe to be the major flaw in McCaw's thinking ... she's not talking about the same bias.

Does the public think journalists are biased? Yes, they do, and that's a problem. But the bias in question is a left/right bias. The majority of Americans think the media leans left. And it will come as no surprise to you that I think otherwise. Conservatives hate the media, because it's the media's job to expose corruption and question power. Thus, the right has spent the last couple of decades convincing Americans that the media is liberal. And it worked. The media is now so paranoid of being "perceived" as liberal that they will no longer dig deep into any issue that is critical of the right. If you need proof of this, look no further than the fact that 70% of U.S. citizens believed that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 and that most of the population still believes there's a scientific debate about global warming. This phenomenon also explains the strange belief that Fox News is center.

If this was the cause for which Wendy McCaw was fighting, I would certainly take notice. But her mission to expunge bias is a red herring. Like every argument she makes, she throws around accusations like a game of dodge ball but never provides any proof. The only time she's actually given any evidence of bias that I know of is when Anna Davison's editor was asked to reprimand her for biased reporting. When asked to give examples of bias in one of Ms. Davison's stories, McCaw produced the following two gems:

1) Anna quoted Mayor Marty Blum too many times.

2) Anna never brought up the (non-existent) debate about the chopping down of trees on lower State Street. When this issue was researched by her editor, he discovered that the only person talking about this supposed controversy was Travis Armstrong in the NP's own editorial pages.

The tree thing is so idiotic that I won't even go there, but I guess the Marty Blum issue could theoretically be argued as a matter of bias. But to do that, Wendy needed to actually bring up the content of the Blum quotes and then explain how Ms. Davison had somehow slanted the story to appear a certain way. But, no, the bias was simply in the very act of quoting the mayor. The Wendy/Travis/Nipper axis of evil hate Marty Blum so much that simply writing down her words is out of bounds.

So, my conclusion in all this is that Wendy McCaw is certainly not using the term bias in the same context it is being used for the sources she often quotes. And based on the Anna Davison story, I would argue that finding Wendy's true definition of bias would be more difficult than getting her to shoot a feral pig. From what I can tell, bias for McCaw means somehow figuring out what things she she doesn't like and then writing about them.