by Tracy Bee

Created on: August 25, 2008   Last Updated: August 26, 2008

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson stated, "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter." He saw the newspaper as a "free organ of communication designed to instruct the people." Indeed, in his legacy, the paper appears to do just that. While Jefferson may have loved the current media's instructional powers, not everyone shares his sentiments.

Present day critics have a problem with this design, accusing the media of telling people what to think when it should simply inform the public so that people may think for themselves. In fact, some say the press goes so far as to pick the country's presidents with its biased slants. These critics view the media as not only biased, but also manipulative and the cause for a misinformed, rather than informed, public. In many cases in modern media, they say institutional beliefs, have replaced individual ones. As for Jefferson's suggestion that politics and newspapers can, in fact, exist separately? These days, the critics would have us belief that the opposite is true. The American political scene forms a large portion of the daily news and even thrives on the attention.

But does it pick the president? To see if these critics' assessment of the media has any merit, I analyzed a series of Washington Post articles that appeared during the first half of November 1999, reviewing how they related details about the 2000 presidential election. As we all know, Bush won. It also quickly became clear that these articles were indeed framed.' That is, the articles' angles not only reflect certain political interests, but the articles were also sensationalized in a way that ultimately highlighted winners. Conflict, the political "horse-race" and candidate personality were highlighted while candidates' actual political mandates and ideals were downplayed. Ultimately, the press did pick the next president during the 2000 election.

In a 1998 survey conducted by the Roper Center/Freedom Forum, which surveyed the political predilections of 139 Washington bureau chiefs, 89 per cent had voted for Clinton in the 1992 election. As well, 61 per cent identified themselves as Democrats, compared to the only 9 per cent who identified themselves as Republican ("Journalists, Politics and the Media" 5). In fact, bias seems to be so prevalent in the media that after his defeat in 1996, Bob Dole publicly scrutinized the "liberal media," claiming

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