Occasionally, I get an e-mail from someone who disputes the contention that, overall, the establishment media has a liberal bias. Some of those e-mails claim that the media is largely unbiased, with the notable exceptions of Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times. In such a world, media bias doesn’t exist except for the handful of outlets that can arguably be described as conservative.

Other people write me to claim that the media has a generally conservative bias, and they often point to President Bush being in the White House and the Republicans controlling Congress as evidence of that bias. By this logic, voters are lemmings who pull the lever for whichever candidate or party the media supports, and that nobody can get elected without the support of the media. Also by this logic, if the media had a conservative bias in 2004, then it had a liberal bias in 1992, 1976, 1964, 1960, etc.

Apparently, Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s ombudsman, receives similar e-mails from disgruntled listeners on both the right and the left. What’s interesting is the line of reasoning employed by his left-of-center correspondents and what it says about their view of the news media’s purpose:

From the left, I sense that some of the e-mail nastiness has to do with frustration over the re-election of President Bush. These listeners feel that the media was unwilling or unable to stop Bush’s ascent to victory.

So, in their world, the purpose of the media is not to dispassionately report the facts, but to actively prevent certain politicians from winning elections. This is really a gripe about the effectiveness of the establishment media, not it’s bias. After all, what was the goal of CBS’s phony memos if not to “stop Bush’s ascent to victory”?

Liberals may recognize the lessening effectiveness of the media’s inherent bias and assume that it means the media is shifting to the right. I would argue that the bias of the press hasn’t changed, it’s just that in today’s new media environment, impact of that bias is now diminished. This may really be what rankles the liberals who fume at folks like Dvorkin.