When ‘conservatives pounce’: The right finds its cautionary tale of subtle media bias

OTTAWA — Accusations of liberal media bias usually come in two distinct flavours.

There are boisterous complaints about “Justin journos” sucking up to the government, purveying “fake news” and peddling lies for partisan and ideological purposes.

It’s clear that both views have gone mainstream in recent years as qualms over media reliability have morphed into widespread mistrust among Canadians. Abacus Data found in 2022 that 44 per cent of Canadians believe “much of the information” they receive from media outlets is false.

And the more conservative you are, the less likely you are to trust the media.

Only 31 per cent of Liberal voters say that information they get from the media is false, compared to 59 per cent of Conservatives. An astonishing 89 per cent of People’s Party of Canada voters say they don’t trust the media. Plunging faith in the media also coincides with government efforts to help beleaguered news organizations adapt to a digital age that has disrupted their ad revenue.

Critics on the right, including federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, have argued that the hundreds of millions of dollars in Liberal newsroom bailouts give journalists a vested interested in protecting the government. (The same charge sticks even more naturally to the predominantly government-funded CBC.)

Like all biases, you’re not really aware of them until somebody points them out

Even those conservatives who don’t think journalists are undercover partisan operators sometimes still detect a subtle type of bias in the news, which may even be more pernicious.

“But like all biases, you’re not really aware of them until somebody points them out. If you’re university-educated and urban-living, you tend to have a worldview that is different from somebody who isn’t — and it takes a lot of effort to open your eyes up,” said MacDougall.

The perceived bias can be so subtle that it can be difficult to articulate. Critics might discern it from the tone of a story, which is subjective and tough to exhibit as ironclad proof of bias. Sometimes it’s in the magnitude of the coverage given to progressive issues over others (think: climate versus the economy), and the type of sources that are chosen to comment on the stories.

When former Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned after a catastrophic appearance in front of Congress in December and a flurry of subsequent plagiarism allegations, conservatives were only mildly surprised to find that much of the news coverage blamed them for the president’s missteps.

One headline, from The Associated Press, rocketed around right-winger group chats and attracted an avalanche of ire on social media: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”

It exemplified perfectly for conservatives the understated kind of media bias they see around them —  one so obvious that it could serve as a case study that anyone could understand.

“Part of why the AP story was so gobsmacking was because it was so shamelessly not aligned with common sense. If you’re just a regular person who doesn’t care a lot about politics and you see that headline, you go, ‘Wait, what? When did plagiarism become a political issue?’” said long-time conservative strategist Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategy.

It’s a long-running inside joke in American conservative circles that when Republicans have a scandal, the press writes about the scandal, but when Democrats have a scandal, the press reports how Republicans “pounce” on the scandal. The phenomenon even has its own Wikipedia page (titled “Republicans pounce,” of course) and some pundits make a point of keeping a running registry of these kinds of stories.

National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke attributes mainstream press biases to his belief that journalists naturally tend to agree with left-of-centre policies and politicians. Even when they attempt to maintain objectivity, it affects the framing of their stories.

“Almost invariably, the press assumes that what the Democrats are doing is normal and that what Republicans are doing is not — even when it is the Democrats who are proposing big changes. This formulation always results in the GOP being cast as the aggressor,” writes Cooke.

In recent decades, conservative parties have begun working to circumvent mainstream journalists as the filter for their messages, with strategists taking the same view of journalists having leftward inclinations that affect their coverage. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has prioritized video messages and other ways of directly reaching out to Canadians and, when he does talk to the media, he’s not afraid to tussle with them.

Research about the ideological leanings of journalists suggests that view might not be entirely off-base.

Journalism today draws more heavily than ever from highly-educated urbanites. And those groups are far more likely to hold progressive views than a general sample of the population.

Research in the United States also found that reporters overwhelmingly describe themselves as liberal.

A survey of 462 financial journalists found that 58 per cent described themselves as very or somewhat liberal, while only four per cent described their views as very or somewhat conservative, reported a 2018 paper by researchers at the Arizona State University and Texas A&M University.

A recent study by The Economist, analyzing the language used by prominent outlets between 2017 and 2022, found that mainstream news generally veered to the left.

The study found that 17 of the 20 most-read news websites in the U.S. used more language associated with the left than the right. It found that TV news outlets, like CNN, underwent a bigger shift to the left over the five years than did written media.

“This Democratic slant has grown over time, driven mainly by changes in once-centrist outlets,” reports The Economist.

The reasons for this are debated, but one theory is that it was another effect from the broader reckoning around social justice that happened during the pandemic and in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Institutions from retailers to museums began explicitly espousing or supporting views associated with left-wing ideology, like critical race theory. Newsrooms were not immune to the pull.

“It used to be that newsrooms were biased towards a small-L liberal, centrist consensus and not that representative of fringe views. Now, I think they’re representative actually of pretty far-left fringe views,” said Roth.

While MacDougall agrees that conservatives generally have to work harder to get a fair shake from the media, he also warned people on the right not to get too caught up in playing the victim. He pointed to the current controversy around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent free luxury holiday in Jamaica as proof that, above all, the media craves juicy stories.

And when conservatives govern, he said, there are times when the negative reporting targeting them is just proper reporting.

“The hardest thing in government to do is to distinguish between the fact that you’re getting heat for being in government versus for being the party that you are in government,” he said.