What Does It Take To Prove Liberal Media Bias? Two Email Accounts and Ten Minutes.
It doesn’t take much to prove that the media is biased in favor of liberals. All you need is two email accounts and ten minutes.
Quick background: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is Missouri’s biggest newspaper. Predictably, it is packed with liberals. Liberal reporters. Liberal columnists. Liberal editors. The place is teeming with bias.
Not that they’d ever admit it. Ask the editors if their personal politics influence their paper’s coverage, and they’ll clutch their pearls in shock. But get them talking about President Trump or Governor Greitens or Republicans in general, and there won’t be enough oxygen for all their criticisms.
But they don’t have to admit it. We can prove it. And it turns out, that’s surprisingly easy.
The experiment
The set-up was simple: two “lawyers” would weigh in on the recent indictment of Missouri’s Republican Governor Eric Greitens. Each would pitch an op-ed to the editorial page editor, Tod Robberson (trobberson@post-dispatch.com and @trobberson on Twitter).
To make it a fair test, we controlled for variables:
- Both pitches were about the same length, with similar subject lines and roughly the same content.
- The names — “Tom” and “Brad” — were suitably generic.
- One pitch arrived on a Thursday afternoon; the other on a Friday afternoon.
- Neither one included a finished piece, but simply a description of a hypothetical op-ed.
- In both pitches, the author included his credentials, his take on the matter, and the appropriate stroking of the journalistic ego.
In other words, both pitches sound like the kind of thing that arrive in a newsroom inboxes every day. Take a look:
Liberal Tom’s pitch:
Conservative Brad’s pitch:
The only meaningful difference in the pitches: one piece argued against the Republican, and one piece was for him.
The Result
Guess which piece got a response in 22 minutes? Liberal Tom, of course. Here’s Tod’s reply:
And guess which pitch hasn’t been responded to in over two weeks? Sorry Conservative Brad.
There you have it. Editor Tod Robberson could find no room for a pro-Republican op-ed he’d never read from a lawyer he’d never heard of. But it took him only 22 minutes — on an early Friday evening no less! — to secure the anti-Republican piece he’d never read from a different lawyer he’d never heard of.
Sorry to burst your lefty bubble, Tod: neither “Tom” nor “Brad” are real. They do, however, reflect the views of real readers of your paper. And you showed what you think of those readers: you’re willing to give the views of Liberal Tom space in your pages, but you don’t offer Conservative Brad even the courtesy of a response.
Need more evidence?
Does one experiment with two faux pitches prove the lefty leanings of St. Louis’ hometown paper? It doesn’t need to. It’s just another data point for how far the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is in the tank for one political party.
Take a look at this story from Joel Currier, part of the coverage of the trial itself. Now, if you only caught the headline, you’d think this story is all about the fact that the private investigator hired to investigate Greitens was under FBI investigation himself:
That’s an interesting story, and it casts doubt on the Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s decision to hire that investigator in the first place. (And to his credit, Currier at least published a piece that questioned the Circuit Attorney’s methods, which is more than can be said for his colleagues.)
Here’s the only problem: the real bombshell within this piece is buried. The real story is that the St. Louis Police Chief — yes, that’s right, the head of all police officers in the city, a cop with over three decades of experience in law enforcement — had grown frustrated with the Circuit Attorney’s conduct. So frustrated, in fact, that he told a reporter that she ought to explain how she’s gone about her investigation. That juicy tidbit makes an appearance around 800 words into the piece:
Woah. To borrow a Biden-ism, that’s a big f-in deal. It’s not everyday that a prosecutor and a police chief spar in public, especially over something as significant as the investigation of a Governor. You’d think that would be the headline, or even the subject of a second, separate piece. The police chief’s comments, after all, could stand alone. It makes you wonder why something so consequential was left as a side dish.
Wait, easy answer: Currier’s comrades at the Post-Dispatch couldn’t stomach the idea of a story that helped the Governor’s case. Thus, the nugget about the St. Louis police chief was buried, because inconvenient facts that help a Republican must be covered up.
The upshot
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editors will have a dozen responses to why they didn’t get back to Brad but did get back to Tom, or why they buried the story of a police chief questioning the integrity of the investigation into the Governor.
The real explanation, we suspect, is the simplest: they just plain don’t like conservatives, Republicans, President Trump, the Governor, and anyone who disagrees with the Post-Dispatch editorial team’s preferred political views, and they will shape their coverage to fit those preferences.
This won’t surprise anyone who pays close attention to the media in general or the media in Missouri in particular. You need only look at the Twitter accounts of the Post-Dispatch’s editors and reporters—people like Kurt Erickson, Tony Messenger, and Christopher Ave—to see where the paper’s staff stand politically.
Still, we shouldn’t simply brush this sort of thing aside or treat political bias among journalists as table stakes. Biased reporting and editing should be brought to light. And it’s important for newsrooms to reckon with it, especially at the state and local level.
Let’s be honest: Political bias in the national media is, at this point, a given. It’s a feature, not a bug. Most consumers who watch MSNBC or Fox know the dish they’re getting served—and they love every bite. But for some reason, we ignore bias in our neighborhood papers, even though it’s often more obvious and flagrant. Many people just assume that because it’s a local paper covering local issues, it’s got to be objective and fair.
There are plenty of smart people in Missouri — including die-hard conservatives and long-time Republicans — who still believe the St. Louis Post-Dispatch calls it as they see it. It’s why certain GOP politicians still fret about the paper’s criticism and fall all over themselves to earn its praise (see: Hawley, Josh). Some on the right even refer to it as a “paper of record.”
Ha. News flash: it isn’t, and it hasn’t been for a long time. In 2018, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is simply an organ of the state Democratic Party. Think of it less like a newspaper and more like Missouri’s version of Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Community Party.
What can you do?
As the old saying goes, you can complain, or you can do something. So if you’re a conservative or a Republican in Missouri, or simply someone who is bothered by biased coverage, what can you do? We’d offer three concrete actions:
1) Cancel your subscription
We bet more than a few people subscribe to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the way a lot of people subscribe to their neighborhood gym: you made the decision to join a long time ago, and you’ve gone to the gym maybe a handful of times since. You ought to cancel that membership, but you always feel guilty. Maybe I’ll go run on the treadmill tomorrow. Yeah, right.
If you’re one of those long-standing subscribers to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, now is the time to cut the cord. You have permission, and you have a good reason. Several, in fact. You’ll save money. You’ll put a dent in their bottom line. And if enough people do the same thing, you may even force some overdue changes at the newspaper.
The subscription line can be reached at: 314–340–8888 or by email at service@stltoday.com. Don’t feel bad: remember, a digital-only subscription to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch costs $9.99 per month and Netflix costs $10.99. And for that extra dollar, you get to watch Stranger Things, which is just leagues better than anything Tony Messenger has ever written. Ever.
2) Block their website
Go ahead and block the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website from your computer. Think about it: they depend on those clicks and views. In other words, they make money each and every time you visit their site.
Why do this? Because you may find yourself staring at a tantalizing St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline on Twitter and feel compelled to click. The only way to hold yourself back is to block the site. It’s the only effective way to make sure that you’re not contributing to their bottom line.
So go ahead and block the URL (stltoday.com). There’s several handy tools that can serve this purpose. If you use Google Chrome, just type in “website blocker” in Google and find yourself a Chrome extension. Here’s a good one. Then just enter in “stltoday.com,” and voila, no more press releases from Democrats — er, reporting and writing from journalists.
3) Let the owners of the paper know how you feel.
Coverage can change. Editorial boards can wake up to bias. It doesn’t happen often, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Newspapers respond to their readers, and like any other product in our market economy, when demand changes, products change.
So contact the people who write the checks: the executives of Lee Enterprises, the company that owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (who, btw, seem to be doing well for themselves even as the paper they own hasn’t). Tell them that you think they should hire people who disagree with the Democratic Party line, or at least consider taking positions that aren’t so predictably liberal.
Here are their names and email addresses:
Kevin Mowbray — President and CEO of Lee Enterprises (kevin.mowbray@lee.net)
Mary Junck — Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of Lee Enterprises (mary.junck@lee.net)
Greg Veon—Vice President, Publishing (greg.veon@lee.net)
Tell them how you feel. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the reader feedback.
Signing off,
Your friendly neighborhood media watchdogs
For people wondering where the byline on this piece comes from, it’s a play on the name Roy Temple (roy@gpsimpact.com and @roytemple on Twitter).
He’s the former head of Missouri’s Democratic Party. Word on the street is he’s been quarter-backing a lot of the anti-Greitens stuff. No surprise there. What is surprising is how much the media trusts him and how closely they work with him. Apparently, him and KMOV’s Lauren Trager have become BFF during this whole process, including a lot of time together before the original story broke (ltrager@kmov.com and @LaurenTrager on Twitter).
He fed her a lot of what he had on the Greitens affair, and because she has no scruples and her bosses at KMOV don’t either, they went ahead and ran the story — a story that, remember, every single other outlet in the state had known about for years and passed on. What Trager probably tells herself was intrepid “investigative reporting” should more accurately be referred to as “a PDF of old opposition research.” More on that, and some other shady things coming to light about Trager’s work, in our next installment.