I have said it here before - bias is not journalism’s most serious defect. I don't know what is for certain, but it may be vocabulary.
Of course, the gap between words and reality is eternal, but these days it’s wider than the Grand Canyon. The world changes, reporters and editors don’t. They cling to words that once made sense.
Consider two stories in today’s New York Times, starting with Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s call for judicial independence.
Yes, this is that William Rehnquist, appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon (and about whose nomination John Dean wrote a fascinating book). This is Rehnquist, a lion of the political right, the very Rehnquist who has led the Court rightward.
And he is worried. He sees that criticism of the federal judiciary "…has taken a new turn in recent years." And he cites several Congressional efforts to intimidate judges. He doesn't say so, but they all emanate from the far right. Right of Rehnquist, that is.
Hold that thought, please.
The second story is about evangelist James Dobson’s threat to defeat several Democratic Senators if they oppose President Bush's nominees - presumably, "strict constructionists" - to the Supreme Court and other federal courts.
In the story, Dobson told the Times he’d been working in this direction every since he had attended a rally backing then -Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. (Moore was fighting to keep a monument to the Ten Commandments in his courthouse.)
The Times reporter, David Kirkpatrick, writes: "The crowd’s reaction [at that rally] demonstrated the depth of popular resentment of liberal court decisions, Dr. Dobson said."
So the separation of church and state is a "liberal" position? (In fact, the Ten Commandments eventually left the courthouse, thanks to a ruling by the US Supreme Court, which only a nut could call liberal.)
What both these stories tell us is that the Far Right is unhappy with conservative positions – independence of the judiciary and church-state separation, both deriving from the Constitution.
And while this happens, the great majority of reporters still use the terms "conservative" and "liberal" as touchstones.
Use them as if they are defined by their relationship on a horizontal line stretching from left to right.
Use them to the exclusion of terms describing a more complex political world, like "far right," "libertarian," "pro-business," "left-wing" and such.
And do so with the acquiescence of editors.
News flash! "Conservative" may be defined historically. Ditto, "liberal."
Update! To use only those words to describe political reality is to distort a complex reality to an unrecognizable shape.
As I was saying, journalism needs to think about its language.