Neal Gabler on Media Bias

Neal Gabler wrote a very interesting book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, a few years ago. Today he's working as a commentator on Fox News and writing op-eds. The Media Bias Myth deserves to be read because it describes accurately the real clash between advocacy journalism and objective journalism. Objectivity may always be suspect, but at least in journalism the goals of objectivity were a noble response to a media that seemed too partisan in the last century. Today this objectivity is branded as liberalism by conservatives and conservatism by liberals. With more channels and news outlets the chance of maintaining even a liberal form of objectivity seems to decline daily.

The editorial is good but the book is even better. More detail on the history of advocate journalism in the nineteenth century and the triumph of entertainment in the twentieth.