Media bias

[Volokh, Eugene]

                I guess I'm a bit lost about the nature of the claim here.
Let's say that we find -- as many gun rights people have alleged, and as to
my knowledge does seem to be the case -- that many media outlets' reporting
on guns is skewed in various ways:  They describe assault weapons as if they
were fully automatic (something which is virtually never the case).  They
repeat without challenge various highly misleading and one-sided statistics
about the supposed danger of guns.  They -- unintentionally, but still in a
way that harms the debate -- focus on high-visibility events like school
shootings and not on low-visibility but much more common events like
defensive gun uses.  They give more attention to the claims of anti-gun
forces than pro-gun forces.  Kleck & Kates, "The Great American Gun Debate,"
chap. 3 (by Kleck) gives lots of specific evidence on this score.  All this
is probably a result partly of the dominant culture among reporters,
especially in New York but also elsewhere, and partly of the attitudes of
corporate executives.  Many on this list will disagree with my
characterizations here, but I'm pretty confident that they're accurate, and
in any case surely lots of people take this view.

                What flows from this?  I suppose one could say that as a
general matter this unfairness and inaccuracy in reporting is not "conducive
to the purposes of the press in a democratic society"; but I still think
that one has said something that doesn't say much beyond "it would be good
for the press to be more balanced, fair, and thoughtful in its coverage of
important issues."  And even if "some well-developed theory of democratic
institutions tells us that 'fairness' in reporting precludes [the media's
actions in covering guns]," all that means is that we'll condemn the media
for doing it (unless we actually conclude that such practices should be
outlawed, which of course none of us are saying, both because of the First
Amendment and more broadly because of a prudent fear of government
controlling media "unfairness") -- which we would with or without a
well-developed theory of democratic institutions, IF we agree with the
factual claim that the media is being inaccurate or biased.

                This seeming tautology makes me fear that there's something
I'm missing here -- some way in which either constitutional law or broader
democratic theory is being proposed as a means of dealing with problems of
media unfairness, inaccuracy, or prejudice.  I guess I just can't see it,
but would love to be enlightened.

                Eugene

Bobby Lipkin writes:

>       What this overlooks is that democratic constitutional theory,
> properly understood, might inform us how to understand these intuitive or
> commonsensical terms in ways that better help us evaluate whether a
> particular newspaper or broadcast policy is conducive to the purposes of
> the press in a democratic society. So that while Eugene is correct  "that
> we all agree that unwise, unfair, or ill-informed decisions are bad, while
> wise, fair, and well-informed ones are better" democratic theory might
> tell us how to understand these terms as critical standards relevant to
> evaluating institutions and particular practices by particular
> institutions if democratic constitutionalism is our goal. To be sure, this
> might be too much to ask of democratic theory.  But I see no reason,
> except the anti-theory arguments of Fish and others, to foreclose this
> possibility in advance. Indeed, it precisely the theoretical work of such
> writers as Dworkin, Sunstein, Fiss, Post, and others that use democratic
> theory, or at least their versions of democratic theory, as explications
> of concepts like equality and free speech, and so forth. Suppose some
> well-developed theory of democratic institutions tells us that 'fairness'
> in reporting precludes CCN's policy, why should we reject such theoretical
> explications of the above terms in advance. Let those who are
> theoretically inclined strive for such explications. If they fail, so be
> it.  But even their failure doesn't show that those of us not so
> theoretically inclined  would not have learned from their success and even
> from their failur! e.
>
> Bobby Lipkin
> Widener University School of Law
> Delaware.
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