Seek the truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently and be accountable and transparent.
To conservative journalist Katie Pavlich, these four tenets of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics have been broken.
Pavlich, news editor for Townhall.com, author and frequent television commentator on Fox News, CNN and other networks, visited UT last Thursday night to give a lecture entitled “Media, the Left and your government: why your mainstream news is propaganda.” Hosted by Issues Committee and the Young Americans for Freedom, Pavlich shared her experiences with bias in American journalism.
“We all have biases as human beings,” Pavlich said. “Bias can come in many forms when it comes to choosing stories for a newscast, choosing stories to write about.”
To illustrate her point, Pavlich recounted her early experiences with bias in journalism while attending the University of Arizona. She recalled one of her journalism professors declaring that Sarah Palin had been treated fairly in the 2008 presidential election — a claim that Pavlich disagreed with, but no one in the class rebutted.
“Then we spent the rest of the semester slamming Fox News while either staying quiet about MSNBC or glorifying their coverage despite MSNBC openly admitting that they are not a news organization,” Pavlich said.
Pavlich said she was judged harshly by her professors for being “too political,” and nearly lost two awards for her work because of the expression of her unconventional views.
“I never got political until they got political inside the classroom,” Pavlich said. “I did that because it seemed like the college atmosphere was a place for open debate, but apparently you’ll get your awards swiped if you try to do that.”
When Pavlich transitioned into the professional world, she said she noticed the same left-leaning biases at news outlets that “claim to be neutral.” For example, Pavlich said contrasting the news coverage of the rise of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement reveals a hidden bias. Created by libertarian and conservative activists, Pavlich said the Tea Party movement caused Democrats to “panic” and immediately label them as “extremists.”
“Meanwhile, true extremists began to pitch their tents, smash the windows of banks and rape women,” Pavlich said. “This movement was known as the Occupy Wall Street Movement and was openly embraced by Nancy Pelosi, President Obama and (Democratic National Committee) chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.”
Pavlich pointed out the Tea Party movement has not been associated with any rapes or arrests since it was created, yet the media has denounced the political movement and had “no questions” about the president embracing the Occupy Wall Street protests.
“When you contrast that to scandals that actually involve the deaths of Americans, for example Operation Fast and Furious or Benghazi, the press doesn’t have as many questions for President Obama,” Pavlich said.
Similarly, Pavlich noticed a stark difference in the coverage on the recent midterm elections and the same elections in 2006. In a study by the openly-conservative Media Research Center, it was found that three big broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — aired a total of 159 news stories on the 2006 midterm elections, while those same networks only aired 25 election-related stories this year.
The difference, Pavlich said, is that Democrats were expected to take control of Congress eight years ago, a very different story from this year’s “transfer of power” to the Republican party.
“Liberal democrats were polling very poorly,” Pavlich said. “Democrats have the lowest approval rating they’ve ever had in 80 years, and they just didn’t want the general public to know that.”
Natalie Bennett, a sophomore in College Scholars and vice chair of the Issues Committee, said Pavlich had a unique perspective on taking news from sources on either side of the aisle with a grain of salt.
“We wanted to bring a speaker regarding an issue that many students do not think about,” Bennett said. “Many young people take news at face value, so it is important to evaluate it carefully, regardless of political opinion.”
While she “can’t talk too much” about her own employer, Fox News, Pavlich admitted that “across the media spectrum, there is sensationalism,” noting that Shepard Smith “got really upset with the entire network over the Ebola coverage.”
In addition to partisanship and the influence of money on large television networks, Pavlich said the Obama administration’s “lack of transparency and access” has contributed to biased reporting.
“When you don’t have an open press, when you don’t have a free press that is willing to actually ask the hard questions of both political parties, there’s a lot of corruption that happens,” Pavlich said.
This lack of transparency, Pavlich said, is the root of many problems in Washington and can lead to unchecked government power.
“If we don’t know what’s going on in government, we don’t know how to change government,” she said.
