I asked Joe if he thought there was bias in the media, and he asked me back if I was talking about at the local level or the network level. I said both. He said that at the local level, while occasionally he’ll get a request by a manager or a producer to slant a story one way or another, for the most part, at the local level they don’t really cover issues that can have a liberal or conservative slant. So it never comes up.
On the network level, he didn’t really know, but he thought that CNN seemed pretty fair to him, but that FOX was way out there.
He went on to say that TV really likes “little guy” stories, that they just make for great television. He said that at the local level, its very challenging for them to make their news compelling enough to get people to watch it instead of CNN or the network news.
I told him that I would watch a weekly show that had both the good and bad from Iraq, and his comment was that he felt that the Iraq coverage at the network level was being done as if it was “local news”, and that didn’t make any sense to him.
I then told him that I didn’t feel there was a liberal bias or a conservative bias as much as a “controversy bias”. He seized on that immediately as a “conflict bias”, and said that it was very much true, that they have to make the news interesting.
In the end, I found interviewing him more interesting then his interview of me. We bloggers like to complain about the MSM, but they’re just doing their job, which is to provide a half-hour of news-entertainment. It was interesting talking to someone from the other side, who has a much harder job then Dan Rather. He has to get Arizonans to watch his show instead of some network show.
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