There have been complaints through the years that the mainstream media has a left wing bias. Media bias received a lot of attention in the United States and then in Canada after the release of Bernard Goldberg's book Bias — a CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News in late 2002. The media does what it can to dispel any notion that they are anything other than fair and impartial purveyors of news.
We have just finished what is perhaps the worst (and definitely the most entertaining) election campaign in history. Election Day saw Scary Stephen become prime minister-designate while the mighty Liberals were reduced to the opposition. and Paul Martin, who spent most of his political life as the heir apparent to Jean Chrétien, was reduced to a bumbling idiot, who at least stopped dithering long enough to announce that he was quitting.
The campaign that saw the Liberals refer to the country's parents as beer drinkers and popcorn eaters, used the once respected military to make fun of the Conservatives in an attack ad and matched the Conservatives' policy-a-day announcement with a scandal a day, was so bad that the media simply couldn't ignore it and retain any shred of credibility.
Now the media are all aglow at the fact that they reported how disastrous the Liberal campaign was and use that as proof positive that there is no L/liberal bias. Typical of their reaction was a column in the National Post by Mary Vallis. Vallis writes how the media during the campaign were a lot tougher on Martin and the Liberals than they were on Harper and the Conservatives. Vallis quotes statistics obtained by the Observatory on Media and Public Policy to prove that the mainstream media was in fact harder on the Liberals than they were on the Tories and goes out of her way to show how the Toronto Star, the greatest media Liberal cheerleader next to the CBC, even criticized the Natural Governing Party. Writes Vallis, "While the Toronto Star officially endorsed the Liberals last week, some of its highest profile writers regularly panned the PM and his campaign." Of course, if the paper were truly balanced they would have conservative columnists who would regularly view the Liberal Party from a right wing perspective and the fact that Chantal Hébert took shots at Martin when he was down would not have been newsworthy.
But if the mainstream media were truly non-biased as Vallis' seems to be claiming her column would make no sense at all. It's a case of the exception proving the rule. To take the last three weeks of the campaign when most of the media turned on the Liberals as an indication that there is no media bias is like taking higher than normal temperatures for three weeks as proof of global warming.
The reality is that the Liberals ran their campaign in a way that the media would have lost all credibility had they stuck to their natural inclinations and supported their favourite. In the long view, the media's election coverage does nothing to rebut the presumption of holding a left wing bias. Nice try though, Mary.
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