Mike Kinsley published an interesting sidebar this week with a brief analysis of the issue—a hot button among conservatives—of liberal bias in the media. His conclusion, more or less, was “it’s there, it’s minor, get over it.”

It amazes me that the navel-gazers in the press tend to ignore what was old news ten years ago. Way back when I was a student at the Annenberg School for Communication, we were reading studies that reached the following conclusions.

1. The people who write for the press tend to be predominantly liberal. (Kinsey makes this point as well.) There are obviously extreme variations depending on the location of the company and the media topic being covered, but the liberals outnumber the conservatives at most of the mainstream urban big-media outlets that set the pace of the news.
2. Different studies have different conclusions about the result of this bias in the profession. Some liberal journalists say that they so effectively self-censor their own beliefs that their writing ends up tending conservative in its assumptions as a result. For example, a liberal journalist writing about a Clinton sex story might have thought it was unimportant, and to counter that belief he might include three right-wing sources in the story’s analysis instead of one.
3. The ownership of this media is now almost entirely in the hands of large corporations, the leadership of which has a conservative slant much greater than the liberal slant of the journalists. Again, different studies have different conclusions on what effect this has. The main issue for both the media and media-watchers is whether the corporate side modifies the journalism in deferrence to its bottom line—i.e., will ABC News spike a story that is unflattering about a Disney property? The answer to this, by and large, is no, and heads get put on pikes when this rule is egregiously broken. But there are more subtle effects which are not as carefully watched.
4. However, the point that is constantly missed is that the agenda for news is unabashedly conservative. The New York Times publishes “all the news that’s fit to print,” which begs the question, what is news?

Take a look at your newspaper’s sections. Chances are, they’ll be national, local, business, style (formerly called “women’s issues” in a more unenlightened time), and sports. Your national and local news will cover a nice swath of business news as well. It’s newsworthy that Alan Greenspan has lowered interest rates again, or sneezed facing north-northwest rather than east-southeast. But the analysis of this information is entirely done from the perspective of what’s important for corporations.

Now take a look at what’s being covered in your local free weekly, such as the City Paper. Chances are, you’ll see stories there that wouldn’t be considered newsworthy by your primary daily paper.

A story covering a corporate layoff will discuss whether it will improve the company’s stock, not the impact of the layoff in the community; it takes a major debacle like Enron’s destruction of employee pension funds, or the primary employer of a small town shutting down, to make the human impact of business newsworthy.

If you think that our definition of newsworthy is universal, I invite you to start reading European and South American newspapers.

So, liberal bias in the news? More of it please. It might even things up.