Yesterday at noon, Media Research Center President Bozell hosted the first in a new series of Webcasts entitled "MRC Live! with Brent Bozell," in which the NewsBusters publisher answers questions submitted by members of the MRC Action Team. We expect to hold the next Webcast sometime in mid-January. We'll bring you more details when we have the date nailed down.
[Click here for information on how to join the MRC Action Team. You can view yesterday's Webcast in the video embed at right.]
Among other questions fielded, Bozell addressed the "why" in the perennial question, why are the mainstream media so liberal:
The Left dominates the news media.... So what do you do about it? Well the first thing you have to do is you have to realize why the Left controls the media. It is not a conspiracy. It's not that there's a cabal of left-wingers that have taken over the news media.... They don't work that way. The liberals who are there were hired by fellow liberals because the liberals who were in charge of hiring felt that their liberal friends were the best qualified.
And it's a simple formula, that's how it works. And their bias takes over, and sometimes, I don't think they even realize their bias is working.
Bozell then went on to give an example of an interaction he had years ago with a journalist who insisted that "we [liberals] are the social conscience of this country, and we have an obligation to use the media."
Thanks in part to the work of the Media Research Center, Bozell added, the ball has been moved on the public's perception of the media's bias:
The public is on to these reporters. When we first started in 1987, only 25 percent of the public believed that there was a media bias at all.... Today, 89 percent of the public believes what they're getting is a reporter's personal opinion. The public now knows the bias that they're getting.
It's incumbent on us to continue to expose that bias on a daily basis, because if we don't, then we lose the traction, and those numbers will go back to where they were before.
