Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (27 page)

But most voters, to a greater or lesser extent, depend on the media for much of their information on contemporary issues. This raises a commonly-asked question: Is the media biased? Conservatives such as Ann Coulter, moderates like Bernie Goldberg, and liberals such as Eric Alterman may disagree on virtually everything, but they all concur that media bias exists, and that it significantly alters people’s views. Liberals and conservatives alike keep their own lists of the most biased news sources. They may dispute which outlets are biased toward which side, but these days there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that bias is a common feature of today’s media establishment.

So does media bias matter? To answer this question, we must first determine whether media bias in fact exists.

For many conservatives, the fact that most members of the media classify themselves as liberal Democrats is proof enough of bias. Surveys of journalists by the Pew Research Center found that between 1995 and 2004, the number of journalists who consider themselves conservatives rose slightly from 4 to 7 percent, while the number of self-identified liberals jumped from 22 to 34 percent.

Campaign finance records are even more lopsided. Television network employees give overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates, with
98 percent of CBS’s employee donations going to Democrats in 2004. The equivalent figure for NBC is an incredible 100 percent. Even employees of FOX News, which is widely regarded as a conservative channel, donate 81 percent of their contributions to Democrats.
⁹⁵
Journalists vigorously deny that such figures indicate bias, insisting that their reporting is based on their professionalism, not their personal political values.

It is interesting, then, to see that surveys of reporters indicate that they also believe the media is biased—against Democrats.
⁹⁶
What does all this mean? Are journalists biased or aren’t they? Is it possible that reporters are so biased that they don’t even realize it? This last possibility is reminiscent of an e-mail I recently received from a history professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, who told me, “As you are well aware, the social sciences tilt strongly to the left. I’ve seen so many Far Left presentations that a mere left-leaning presentation strikes me as moderate and objective.”

Like this e-mail, most studies of media bias are anecdotal. It is difficult to determine what purely “unbiased” coverage would even look like. The problem is that bias is often in the eye of the beholder. Media watchdogs such as the Media Research Center regularly report examples of reporters slanting stories in some way. But viewers tend to filter the reports through the prism of their own political views. Democrats might regard a critical story about President Bush as justified and true, while Republicans would view it as biased.

In order to assess media bias, we must first find some objective news item and then analyze how it’s covered in the media. But what kind of news can be identified as “objective?” Economist Kevin Hassett and I studied media bias between 1985 and 2004 by analyzing how the media presented economic data such as the unemployment rate, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods. Here, there is little ambiguity over what the “objective” news is: it’s the economic number itself and how it has changed over time. We confined our study
to the headlines. This was done because headlines not only create the strongest image in readers’ minds, but more importantly, they are easier than is a long text to classify objectively—by conveying that things are getting “better,” “worse,” or that the news is “mixed.”
⁹⁷

Our study found pervasive media bias. Even after accounting for whether the economy was in an upswing or downswing at any given time, the headlines were more positive during Clinton’s presidency than during any of the Republican administrations. This bias—the difference in positive headlines during Democratic and Republican presidencies for the same underlying economic news—meant that headlines were between 10 and 20 percentage points more positive during a Democratic presidency. Headlines about economic news also became relatively more positive when Democrats controlled Congress, but reached their most negative when Republicans controlled both the presidency and the legislature.

Among the top ten individual newspapers, we found strong evidence that the
Chicago Tribune
, the
New York Times
, and the
Washington Post
were much more likely to portray economic news positively during a Democratic presidency. The same was true for the Associated Press. However, there was a bit of a “hometown effect” for Republicans. The
Houston Chronicle
treated both Bushes about the same as Clinton, while the
Los Angeles Times
covered Reagan slightly more positively than it did Clinton.

Perhaps most importantly, we found that media coverage does indeed affect public opinion. Media coverage better explained whether people thought that the economy was getting better or worse than did the underlying economic data. Comparing our results with public opinion data from the Gallup Poll, we found that media bias resulted in people being 4 percentage points more likely to view the economy positively under President Clinton than they would have been under the same conditions during a Republican presidency.
⁹⁸
This translates into a comparable percentage difference in presidential approval ratings, an
important finding in light of the close presidential races of 2000 and 2004.
⁹⁹

The topic of media bias has recently drawn much attention, but public schools may be even more influential in molding the worldview of future voters. A majority of Americans probably assume this is a good thing, as they hold education, as well as the teachers who provide it, in high regard. Anyone who has witnessed school board battles over curriculum or even individual textbooks knows how much is at stake in determining what future generations will be taught. But what most people don’t realize is that public education was actually designed to spread government-approved values.

Before delving into the history of American education, let’s first look at education systems in totalitarian countries. In order to instill the proper adherence to the ruling ideology, totalitarian leaders must attack the most common locus for spreading oppositional values—the family.
¹⁰⁰
To weaken parental influence, the Soviet Union during the 1920s and again in the 1950s experimented with raising children in “communal children’s houses, dining halls, and other institutions that would decrease the importance of the individual household.” These efforts were rekindled decades later during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, when the Soviet government forcibly transferred tens of thousands of three- and four-year-old Afghanis to the USSR. By educating the children away from their families, the Soviets hoped to instill Communist ideals and then return their subjects to Afghanistan years later as part of a loyal government administration.
¹⁰¹

The danger of the family in passing on the “wrong” values to their children was summed up by a Soviet refugee shortly after World War II: “In many respects, the family is most immune to the pressures of the
regime. It thus constitutes the single most significant seedbed for the generation, preservation, and transmission of antiregime attitudes and information which the regime would like to suppress.”
¹⁰²

Government attempts to supplant parents as the primary source of social values are not even limited to totalitarian countries. A particularly disturbing example is evident in the justification given for the creation of Sweden’s extensive nursery school system. Declaring that “School is the spearhead of Socialism,” Ingvar Carlsson, Sweden’s education minister from 1969 to 1973 (and later prime minister), insisted that removing children from the home through “pre-school training is essential ‘to eliminate the social heritage’” of undesirable, reactionary parental views.
¹⁰³
Swedish educational theorists even advocated tax and government employment policies that would “get both parents out of the home, so that children are forced out as well.”
¹⁰⁴

By abolishing the very concept of the family, totalitarian governments hope to create a government monopoly on the transmission of social values. Once this is achieved, the main avenue through which this monopoly spreads the regime’s values is through the education system. By instilling in young students the idea that the regime is legitimate and acts fairly, totalitarian governments seek to reduce potential opposition to their rule. They invest enormous resources in these endeavors for a very rational reason—evidence shows that government-provided schooling reduces political opposition and predisposes students to support the government when they get older.
¹⁰⁵

In totalitarian countries, the hiring and firing of educators is often based explicitly on political grounds. Reporting on the Soviet Union, one observer noted that, “promotions based on non-academic criteria tend to dilute the quality of senior academics, and such promotions are common. Many educational administrators are essentially Party bureaucrats moved into this line of work.”
¹⁰⁶
In Communist Czechoslovakia, school administrators were “instructed to gather information from selected Communist students in the Pioneer and
Youth Union organizations to present ‘a view from below’” regarding the political reliability of teachers.
¹⁰⁷
Soviet teachers also had to deal with the presence of “informers in the class.”
¹⁰⁸

Apartheid-era South Africa placed a similar value on ideological education. Four separate school systems were established for whites, blacks, Asians, and coloreds. Segregated racially, teachers taught to students of their own race. Being a black teacher in a government school was a dangerous job. Perceived as complicit in perpetuating apartheid, black teachers were pariahs in their own communities and were sometimes killed by other blacks. Ironically, despite the prevailing ideology of white-supremacy, the government was forced to pay black teachers the highest premiums over what they would normally earn to compensate for the risks they faced and to try to ensure their political reliability.

Today, this kind of state indoctrination is commonly found in radical Muslim states. In Saudi Arabia and other fundamentalist Muslim countries, “Arab children are being taught that Jews are inherently not humans, that they are born from monkeys and pigs, that it is perfectly alright to kill them.”
¹⁰⁹
Routinely portraying the United States as a manifestation of Satan, the Saudi and Iranian regimes teach that Islam will inevitably rule the world and that all non-Muslims will perish.
¹¹⁰

One would assume that even if state education is used for these malign purposes in totalitarian or highly authoritarian countries, surely this isn’t the case in the United States. However, while the degree of indoctrination in American schools never reached totalitarian levels, a brief history of the evolution of American public schooling reveals that public schools, in fact, did develop specifically as a method to inculcate values supported by the government.

As in many other countries, public education in the United States began at the instigation of churches. For a long time, schooling was openly religious. In the 1820s, in New York and in other states, legislators became concerned that many students were receiving the wrong
type of education. It was not that children were going uneducated—in 1821, about 93 percent of New York’s school age youths were already attending private schools.
¹¹¹
As expressed in legislative debates, the fear was that students educated in private Catholic schools would learn the wrong values and end up becoming criminals. If Protestant schools could be made less expensive through government subsidies, the legislators reasoned, some Catholics would transfer their children there, thus saving them from a life of crime.
¹¹²

The subsidies began as a kind of voucher system in which approved Protestant schools received a per pupil payment. However, this had an unintended consequence: the subsidized Protestant schools started competing against each other to attract Catholic students. To compete, they began teaching more of what Catholic parents and students wanted—reading, writing, and math—and less of what they didn’t want—Protestant religious training. Advocates of the subsidies found that the subsidized schools were no longer providing the religious training that justified the funding program in the first place.

In response, subsidies were limited to the approved Protestant school nearest to a student’s home. This reduced the incentive for the schools to compete against each other, and thus to limit their Protestant religious instruction. As government programs tend to do, over time the subsidy scheme grew until it began eliciting complaints that the subsidized schools were getting most of their money from the government while being protected from competition. With the Free Schools Act of 1867, the state simply took over the subsidized schools, which then became public institutions.
¹¹³
This is the surprising, true origin of America’s public school system.

So what are these government values that are spread in the education system? In short, the government has a vested interest in teaching the young to believe that government policies can effectively solve problems. Public school teachers have a natural incentive to teach this axiom as well. Recall my personal story form this book’s introduction,
in which I related how public university professors abhorred the prospect of tax cuts, which could result in reductions of their own university budgets. Public high school teachers face the same incentives. They have an abiding, personal interest in perpetuating the growth of government, which is the source of their own livelihood.
¹¹⁴