RUTHFULLY YOURS

The folks at Pew set out to determine the network with the most obvious bias, what Pew calls the most “opinionated.” The winner, and hence the loser in the race for the viewers the advertisers covet most, is MSNBC. Pew finds that fully 85 percent of MSNBC “content” is commentary, not news. It’s fitting that the cable network with the longest name and the fewest viewers is the most opinionated.

The network of Chris Matthews, where the newsroom is overrun with creepy crawly things on the scout for legs to crawl up, spends less on newsgathering than CNN and Fox, and depends on rants and raves to attract an audience of rant-lovers and rave aficionados. CNN spends twice as much on actual newsgathering than MSNBC, and Fox, reviled on the left as merely a source of gasbaggery, spends about three times as much as MSNBC on reporting and editing actual news.

Norman Mailer (courtesy MDCarchives)

The Pew Center, which is hardly a coven of right-wing soreheads – and in fact leans somewhat to the left – hired a team of researchers with a weakness for masochism and a taste for truculence to listen to 700 hours of cable-news programming and read 15,000 columns, essays, op-eds and other printed rants over a five-year period, covering a presidential election (2008) and mid-term congressional elections (2010). The survivors of this exercise discovered that over those five years, actual coverage of the news – sending reporters out to dig for facts and interview the makers of news, unhappy as they might be for editors and managers – declined sharply. Why spend money for reporters when you can find people willing to talk for free in return for getting their faces on the small screen?

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, gentleman, scholar and Democratic senator from New York, said that every man is entitled to his own opinion but nobody is entitled to his own facts. The senator died just in time, on the eve of the dawn of modern media, where readers and viewers congregate, like a flash mob, only with those who share their facts and opinions. Such readers and viewers don’t want to know what anyone else thinks and live in terror of running across an opinion they don’t share, or learning something they didn’t know.