The Rawls Report
California Media-bias
Why a moderately conservative electorate is represented by a left-wing legistature
by Alec Rawls
Contributing Editor

Californians consistently elect representatives who stand far to the left of themselves. For instance, a recent Field Poll reports that 59% of Californians are against the law signed by ex-Governor Gray Davis that allows illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses. Yet the law passed the state Senate by a 20% margin and the Assembly by a 6% margin.

This has been a persistent pattern in California politics for many years now. Californians overwhelmingly approve conservative ballot measures that the state legislature overwhelmingly disapproves. In 1995, Proposition 209, which banned government use of racial preferences, passed by a 60-40 margin. Nearly identical majorities passed Prop. 227, ending bilingual education in the public schools; Prop. 187, curtailing state services to illegal aliens; and Prop. 22, defining marriage as between a man and a woman. All were despised by virtually all Democrat legislators and all but the last were opposed by large numbers of Republican legislators as well.

There are only two possible explanations for this mismatch between the California's moderately conservative electorate and its left-wing legislature. Either Californians are intentionally voting for people who they disagree with, or they are getting bad information. The first explanation is not plausible, while the latter is not just plausible, it is verifiable.

All four of California's major papers - The Los Angles Times, The Sacramento Bee, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News - are relentlessly illiberal ("liberal" in the popular usage), being anti-liberty at every turn. They are anti-gun rights and anti-school choice. They are anti-market. They are anti-growth. They are anti-defending-the-country. In short, they are just as leftist as the legislature.

They also lie. To see documentation of a number of examples this summer of blatant lying and media bias by Bay Area newspapers, see the report appended to this article on the Review's website. Most California media bias is not so obvious as the flat-out lie. Editors just have no interest in giving column inches to conservative views. Not that they won't run the occasional George Will or Charles Krauthammer opinion. That's a necessity. And they'll publish any and every conservative who crosses over and attacks the President (making Pat Buchanan a peculiar bedfellow). The problem is that almost none of their writers or editors are conservative themselves, leaving these papers uniformly ignorant of and hostile to conservative understanding.

California papers do not even employ token conservatives. The lone conservative voice in Bay Area print news is Debra Saunders at the San Francisco Chronicle, who presumably (given the Chronicle's proud championship of affirmative action) was hired because she is a very talented woman. More typically, affirmative action is used to lower the bar for illiberal "liberals," such as Chronicle opinion columnist Joan Ryan, an internally promoted sportswriter who has no grasp of current events beyond the most sophomoric political correctness. (Ryan's debut article as a regular opinion page columnist was a worn-out condemnation of SUV drivers. No way the Chronicle was going to make the Debra Saunders mistake again.) Bay Area television stations are similarly politically correct. All are co-anchored by women who have mastered the bathetic art of putting on long faces and deep voices and remarking sadly on every accusation of racism, sexism, or other unfairness.

On simply worded ballot measures, voters do not need any additional information to know how to vote. If they despise racism, they vote to bar the government from using racial preferences. If they are pro-immigrant and anti-crime, they vote against giving state services to illegal aliens. The fact that the illiberal media describe these measures as racist and anti-immigrant rolls off people's backs because they have independent knowledge of the issue.

With most news stories, however, the substance of the issue is not independently known by readers and listeners, who must rely on media characterizations. Here the relentless anti-conservative bigotry of the media is a tremendous obstacle for conservative candidates to overcome.

Suppose a candidate is for gun rights. The local media regularly publish anti-gun opinion pieces and run anti-gun junk-science as news while completely blacking out the actual news that crime falls dramatically when more law abiding citizens are armed. Gun rights are skewered as wacky right-wing zealotry at the expense of public safety, regardless of the overwhelming evidence that gun rights enhance public safety. By implication, any gun-rights candidate also puts zealotry ahead of public safety. No matter how many times the efficacy of gun rights for deterring crime is verified, as it has been many times, no Californian will ever learn it from the major media.

With every conservative issue and candidate smeared by this kind of disinformation, conservatives are at a tremendous disadvantage with the majority of voters who do not avail themselves of alternative news sources. A conservative estimate of the magnitude of this disadvantage is the gap between the views of the people and their representatives on the driver's license bill and on ballot measures. (This estimate is conservative because it does not account the ability of the press to affect people's views on the issues themselves.)

By this measure, media-bias is good for about a 20% electoral edge for the illiberal Democrat-left in California. With quite a bit of consistency, conservative/liberty issues that the people are 60% for, their representatives are 60% against. Subtract away this 20% electoral edge that can only be attributed to the illiberal media-monopoly and the core illiberal vote seems to be about 40%. Together with the 20% boost from their media monopoly, this leaves the Democrats in firm control except on ballot measures. One way to fight back is to pursue a strategy of government by ballot measure. While this avenue has been a godsend for California, its power has up till now been greatly limited by Democrat control of the executive. The people could pass Prop. 209, for instance, but they couldn't stop the Democrats who staff the government from finding ways to employ race preferences surreptitiously, as by giving university admission credit for overcoming "hardship," then accounting race a hardship. With Governor Schwarzenegger in control of the executive, government by ballot measure becomes a real possibility. How about an energy deregulation scheme, produced not by the Democrat sausage factory in Sacramento, which neither understands nor believes in markets, but produced by a panel economists who are experts in the field? With Arnold's backing, the people would pass it 60-40 and the idiots in Sacramento could just be ignored.

The long-term need is to break the left-wing media monopoly by buying one of California's big four newspapers and turning it into a real newspaper, with no demagoguery either in news or opinions. Only when the left-wing media monopoly is broken will the actual conservatism of the California electorate be reflected in state government.

How about a California Truth Leader, with statewide distribution? Page three could be dedicated to exposing lies and bias in the state's other major papers, while down one side of the front page would be listed all errors of fact or reason that had appeared in the Leader itself, in order of significance. It would be a profitable investment, too. That is a guarantee, in this honesty-starved state. Anybody want a share?

Alec Rawls is a Contributing Editor for The Stanford Review. He is currently writing a book on republicanism. Contact alec@rawls.org or visit http://www.rawls.org/

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:25:46 MST.