Reports call media out on `left-wing bias'

Can you trust the information you receive from media, whether digital or print, whether national or local?

Or, as some critics insist, are journalists and the publications they represent hopelessly biased and is that bias, Fox News notwithstanding, heavily weighted to the left?

This debate has become increasingly pointed since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Since then events such as the 2020 killing of George Floyd; the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; and the furor over Israel's ongoing response to the Hamas terrorist attacks and Palestinian rights have raised the national, and local, temperature all the more. Two recent accounts regarding this perception of left-wing bias have attracted considerable attention. One was penned by NPR staffer Uri Berliner, a senior editor whose essay earlier this month on an online news site claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America's trust” by reporting the news with a decidedly left-wing bias.

Berliner, a Peabody Awardwinning journalist who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said the bias has infected the company's coverage of major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop. Fallout from the article led conservatives to insist NPR's federal funding needs to end, and NPR staffers to react with outrage.

NPR's new chief executive Katherine Maher called Berliner's article “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” Maher, 42, has faced criticism for making a series of anti-Trump and social/racial justice tweets.

Earlier this week, NPR reported Berliner had been suspended for five days without pay, because, the company said, he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets. NPR said Berliner will be fired if he violated this policy again.

The other account appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “The New York Times is investigating itself.” The story reported that as many as 20 Times staffers were interviewed to determine if employees had leaked confidential information related to Gaza war coverage to another media outlet.

The Journal and the Times are considered the most widely read news outlets in the U.S. The Journal's Editorial page, however, reflects mainly politically conservative views, which has in the past caused some news staffers to question if these views influence coverage of Trump and, now, Israel's war in Gaza against Hamas.

But, unlike the Journal, the Times' news coverage has occasionally been called into question, even by the paper's management – especially on topics such as covering the transgender community and social justice issues.

The most recent flashpoint was over an in-depth article published by the Times that found Hamas weaponized sexual violence in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Some staffers questioned the story's reporting and maintained that the suffering of Gazans isn't getting the same attention. Times editors said last month they stand by the reporting.

The internal probe, which has since ended with no conclusive finding, was another volley in an ongoing fight between Times' top management and its workforce over issues involving journalistic integrity and journalists attempting to apply their own “ideological purity” standards to their coverage.

And while some journalists are openly dismissive of journalistic traditions such as impartiality, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger agrees readers' trust is at risk, writing that some journalists are embracing “a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction.”

Clearly, the New York Times with more than 10 million paid subscribers to its digital and print products, is not suffering economically from perceptions its news report is slanted. But, media critics say younger hires, who come out of college often unwilling to accept dissenting views, are not trained in the kind of independent journalism that for many years was the standard.