Dana Millbank on the media.

Yesterday I attended a master's tea with Washingpost correspondent Dana Millbank. Here are the highlights from his talk:

• Millbank believes that though most journalists are liberals, they try very hard to balanced. I told him that I thought part of the problem with journalism was that journalists usually do either one of two things a) They try to be completely even-handed and make no judgements. However, this leads them to report without any sense of context. As Millbank said, this leads to reports such as, "Tom Delay claimed that the Moon is made out of green cheese. However, Senate minority leader Tom Daschale countered that this is completely false." Politicians can easily learn to abuse journalists who do not make judgements. b) Journalists do try to interpret events in their reports, and their liberal bias shows through. Millbank agreed with this analysis and said that perhaps what we really need is affirmative action for convservative journalists. I agree with this. There is no such thing as pure objective reporting. There are so many events in the world and so much to report on that all reporting requires interpretation. Without conservative reporters, it is inevitable that the liberalism of the journalists will show through. When that happens, conservative viewers will be turned off and switch to the O'Reilly Factor and Rush Limbaugh, who both have no sense of journalistic standards whatsoever.
• Millbank does believe that their is an "elite bias" among the media. This leads a number of biases while reporting, such as being very pro-free trade.
• He criticized journalism schools as being useless.
• He thought one of the biggest problems in the news media was the profit motive. Stories are selected that will sell. The news that has the best pictures and videos will end up on the news, regardless of its importance.