The Benefits of Surveillance

By Thomas Griffith

Remember all the fuss over a 1981-82 survey professing to show that the news is being distorted by a liberal journalistic elite that is out of touch with the rest of America? Conservative pressure groups with lots of money to spend spread these charges far and wide. Recent cover stories in two professional magazines challenge the accuracy of the findings. But what is stranger is that the accusations no longer seem to matter so much, and the reason is Ronald Reagan.

A "liberal tilt" does exist in the personal views of a majority of newspapermen, according to Public Opinion, a scholarly bimonthly published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The magazine cites a Los Angeles Times poll matching what newspaper journalists think on a wide range of issues with what the public thinks. Noting the differences, Public Opinion asks, "Does it matter?" It concludes from the same poll, "The public gives the news media high marks for professionalism, fairness, accuracy and reliability, and people perceive no serious left-wing bias in the material they see and read. Bias is not a major grievance for the public."

That finding will not, of course, reassure the most hyperthyroid of press critics. They should be more worried about an article in the Columbia Journalism Review. In it, Columbia Sociologist Herbert J. Gans analyzes the original attack on press bias, known as the Rothman-Lichters survey, and finds that it was biased in ways that "depart from scientific practice." Journalists were shown a set of statements--some of them admittedly oversimplified--and asked if they agreed or disagreed. Their responses to individual statements not of their own phrasing were then, says Gans, treated "as strongly felt opinions in a way that makes the journalists appear militant and radical." He finds this disturbingly unprofessional behavior by academic researchers.

If the whole controversy now seems a little dated, credit Reagan's success in changing the political atmosphere. He has created a tranquil public acceptance of his presidency much like Eisenhower's, while proposing reforms as potentially sweeping as Roosevelt's. This change conditions the behavior of both the right wing and the press. Right-wingers used to argue that Reagan's popularity proved the victory of their ideology. Consequently, any press questioning of Reagan's program was "out of step with the rest of America," and any compromise by Reagan was the fault of pragmatists on his staff who would not "let Reagan be Reagan."

This was a condescending reading of Reagan's political skill. The public knows better: in poll after poll it rejects many Reagan policies while approving of the man. Reagan often gets his facts wrong and tolerates too much internal bickering, but to the public these are flaws in a man it likes and trusts. The press is expected to do its job in reporting them.

Why, then, in such a tranquil atmosphere are so many conservatives unhappy with the national news media? Gans invokes an old sociological concept called surveillance. It holds that people keep up with the news partly "to learn about threatening events, problems, and people in the larger society that could eventually hurt them personally." Conservatives think journalists do not pay enough attention to the surveillance of problems they consider important: "the activities of domestic Communists, secular humanists, and others whom they believe to be threatening America." Radicals and liberals have similar, though less publicized, discontents, says Gans. Radicals think the press does not keep enough track of misdeeds of the ruling class: "Liberals want more surveillance news" about Reagan's plans to scuttle the New Deal and the Great Society. Gans argues that the press deliberately limits "surveillance news to the most general or widely feared threats, such as natural disasters, domestic political violence, economic upheavals and Communist expansion."

Perhaps, Gans suggests, the press should pay more attention to criticism from the "ideologically inclined." But how? By playing up fears and suspicions that the press itself believes to be exaggerated? The press remembers when it headlined every wild accusation by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy without checking his facts. That lesson in irresponsibility the press has no need to unlearn.