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Bibliographical Essay The introduction to this book explains the approach, commonly labeled ‘‘framing ,’’ adopted in this study. Framing is designed to examine the assumptions in the press in a much broader perspective than that of politics. In this essay, I add to this work by providing a retrospective review of those studies, so prevalent and dominant outside universities, which characterize in a contrary way the press as politicized, either as partisan, ideological, or both. Further, that same literature proposes or assumes an unbiased press to replace the flawed one we have. The purpose here is to help the reader understand the context in which this study approaches the media. To comprehend the literature that focuses on politics, we need to go back in time. Originally, the press existed to express political viewpoints, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a transformation of the public view toward a press free of politics. Indeed, Michael Schudson, in Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, ∞Ωπ∫), has pointed out the series of strategies used by the twentieth-century mainstream press to proclaim their objectivity with greater and greater credibility. These strategies have included the installation of higher walls between the reporting and the editorial functions of news operations; the labeling of analysis whenever it was included among news reports; and reporters’ elevating almost to the level of a fetish the requirement to always present both sides of every story. The demise of competition in many cities throughout the course of the last one hundred years has contributed significantly to the increased efforts toward objective practices by the news media, especially among reporters and editors of the print media. In such circumstances, newspaper publishers wanted to offend as few readers as possible . They saw the opportunity to sell their products to an entire city, and perceptions of bias could have defeated that commercial objective. For broadcast outlets, which had to defend their reporting against government scrutiny, the process of review and examination also encouraged broad, uncontroversial stands. Moreover, contributing to this increased ‘‘objectivity’’ of the media was ≤≤∏ bibliographical essay the increasing professionalization of the business of gathering and reporting the news, including the formal, and sometimes moral, education of many reporters in college journalism schools all across the country. Despite the embrace of news analysis after the turn of the twentieth century, then, the public seems to have accepted the notion of increasing unbiased news. It was coverage of the Vietnam War and the fallout from the Watergate break-in that seem to have done the most to encourage the perception that objective approaches in the media were breaking down. Although newspapers in the United States neither returned to proclaiming their political allegiances, as in the early nineteenth century, nor embraced the sensationalism of ‘‘yellow journalism,’’ the public nevertheless came to believe that the press had embraced a liberal agenda. This actually may not have been the case, as the critical reporting that observers saw, and themselves criticized, possibly sprang more from the actual failures in Vietnam and the actions of the administration of President Richard Nixon than they did from any bias among reporters and editors. Still, many observers believed that the media appeared to be following a liberal line. Many white Southerners saw this liberalism in the press con- firmed by the media’s strong support for civil rights, and nationally many came to see all media as liberal. And in fact, many Hollywood renditions of the press—from the general corruption and decadence pictured in The Front Page (Warner Brothers, ∞Ω≥∞), Citizen Kane (RKO, ∞Ω∂∞), and His Girl Friday (Columbia , ∞Ω≥Ω), to the liberalism celebrated in All the President’s Men (Warner Brothers, ∞Ωπ∏)—reinforced this view of an emergent liberal press. Despite these developments in which the public saw the bias or inclinations of journalists as liberal, it was liberals themselves who were among the first to complain about media bias. David Halberstam’s book The Powers That Be (New York: Alfred Knopf, ∞ΩπΩ), probably the most widely read book ever in the history of the press, lauded the actions of the media in Vietnam and Watergate and in doing so began the most recent tendency toward a concern about political leanings. The book itself did not show, or even try to demonstrate, that journalists were political. Rather, Halberstam largely portrayed them as independent seekers of the truth hampered by government officials or conservative publishers. And though the writers Halberstam wrote about triumphed, in his telling, he closed his book with a lament that...

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