L.A. Times editor John Carroll has called off his war on liberal bias, if there ever really was one in the first place. I say “if” because, contrary to Kevin Roderick’s characterization of the memo as a “war on ‘liberal bias’” [internal sneer quotes his], the memo was more about a perceived liberal bias than a complaint about actual bias. Take the first two sentences of the memo:

I’m concerned about the perception—and the occasional reality—that the Times is a liberal, “politically correct” newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right.

The memo goes on to describe in detail an instance in which the Trainer clearly did prove its critics right, and Carroll acknolwedged as much. However, the entire memo must be read in light of the introduction, which makes it clear that even in 2003, Carroll viewed liberal bias in the Trainer as more of a P.R. problem than anything else. The implication was, get rid of the most extreme cases of actual bias (his example was a reference to a “so-called” counseling requirement), and on everything else, carry on, but try to be a little more subtle.

Apparently, the Golden Age of Subtlety is over.
Those days, in Carroll’s world, liberal journalism wasn’t really that liberal; everyone else is just too conservative. Nowadays, conservative journalists don’t count as “journalists” at all. According to the Oregon Daily Emerald, here’s what Mr. Carroll had to say to his future subordinates:

“All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism,” he said. “They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call a pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated.”

In a scathing critique of Fox News and some talk show hosts, such as Bill O’Reilly, Carroll said they were a “different breed of journalists” who misled their audience while claiming to inform them. He said they did not fit into the long legacy of journalists who got their facts right and respected and cared for their audiences.

Got that? Hiring Bill O’Reilly, a center-right commentator (not a journalist), makes FoxNews guilty of practicing “pseudo-journalism.” Presumably, however, hiring Robert Scheer, a far left nut of a commentator who frequently lies outright, does not make the L.A. Times guilty of the same. Do go on, Mr. Carroll:

Carroll cited a study released last year that showed Americans had three main misconceptions about Iraq: That weapons of mass destruction had been found, …

Which, of course, is true. You wouldn’t know that, however, if you got all your news from the mass media, including FoxNews. Pseudo-journalist extraordinaire Bill O’Reilly complains about Saddam’s supposedly nonexistent WMD all the time.

…a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq had been demonstrated …

Which may well be true, depending on whose intel you believe, and what inferences you choose to draw from it. Again, I didn’t get this from FoxNews, nor can I recall ever being led by anyone at FoxNews to believe that Iraq did or didn’t have anything to do with al-Qaeda - and I’m a regular viewer..

It would be good to see the precise wording of this question, however. Given the obvious bias of the study itself - note the absence of a single question that the most uninformed, knee-jerk liberal could possibly get “wrong” - my bet is that the “right” answer is that Saddam Hussein absolutely, positively, fer-sher, had zero, zip, nada to do with any of al-Qaeda’s activities, and any respondent who thinks he might have had such involvement is a dittohead who thinks Saddam Hussein personally masterminded 9-11, and that the war in Afghanistan was just a diversion.

…and that the world approved of U.S intervention in Iraq.

Once again, I’d like to see the wording of the question on that one. I don’t believe for a minute that most or even many FoxNews viewers believe that the entire world, or even most of it, supported the U.S. effort to remove Saddam. Too many of them had been bought off for that - a fact which the liberal media, but not FoxNews, has done a horrible job reporting. Does Carroll think FoxNews viewers think we came up with “freedom fries” because we were mad at the French for supporting us too strongly?

I have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the question was worded so that anyone who overestimated the number of countries that backed us got the question “wrong,” while anyone who underestimated it - including those who claimed we had no international support at all - got the question “right.”

He said 80 percent of people who primarily got their news from Fox believed at least one of the misconceptions. He said the figure was more than 57 percentage points higher than people who get their news from public news broadcasting.

Well, duh. As noted above, it’s not clear that any of these “misconceptions” were misconceptions at all. More importantly, by limiting the survey to questions Fox News viewers (conservatives, by and large) tend to get “wrong,” it goes without saying that public news broadcasting fans (overwhelmingly liberal) would tend to get those questions “right.” Let’s try a few new survey questions to balance things out. I have no doubt that FoxNews viewers would outscore fans of socialized broadcasting on any of the following poll questions, if asked:

1. Whether or not there was an “Oil for Food” scandal.
2. If such a scandal existed (hint: it did), how many, if any, of our “allies” who did not support the war in Iraq, were benefitting from that scandal, or were paid off by the Saddam regime in some other way.
3. Whether or not Saddam Hussein’s regime gave refuge to Abu Nidal, the international terrorist
4. Whether or not George Bush claimed in advance of the 2003 war that Iraq posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S.
5. Whether or not CNN, by its own admission, intentionally withheld for years any stories of the Hussein regime’s atrocities in order to maintain “access” to the regime, which access would then enable CNN to broadcast even more half-truths and misleading stories from the country.
6. Whether or not Scott Ritter, the darling of the anti-war movement, willfully refused to talk about the Hussein regime’s mistreatment of innocent children, as he more interested in “waging peace” than he was in honestly describing the state of affairs in Iraq.
7. Whether or not any credible allegations have been made about Mr. Ritter which, if ultimately proved, would seriously undermine his credibility on Iraq, or overall.
8. Whether or not Saddam’s regime attacked the U.S. at any time between 1991 and 2003.
9. Who Micah Wright is.
10. Where Kuwait is, on both the internationally recognized map and the Iraqi version.

I could go on - and on, and on - but I’m getting bored, and 10 is a nice, round number, so I’ll stop here. Feel free to add any other questions in the comments which systematically favor liberals or conservatives (by asking questions a knee-jerk liberal/conservative will almost always get “right” by chance).

so deeply in the dark?” Carroll asked.

Well, as a regular FoxNews viewer who got all three questions “wrong,” I can attest that even if Mr. Carroll’s version of right and wrong were accurate, FoxNews is not to blame for it. I’ve come across plenty of media suggesting that (1) enough WMD have been found in Iraq to justify the war (more than the mass media generally suggests, albeit far less than we expected), (2) Saddam’s regime worked very closely with some international terrorists, and probably attempted to work with al-Qaeda as well, and (3) the Coalition of the Willing was a helluva lot bigger than the BushLied crowd likes to portray it. But I didn’t get very much of that information from Fox.

He said while much media has ended up “in the gutter,” the L.A. Times has a different philosophy and was dedicated to taking the “high road.”

Oh, really? If last minute bombshells about the Gropengate scandal are the “high” road, I’m not sure I want to know what the low road is.

“I do think that a lot of newspaper people have made a lot of strategic mistakes,” he said. “They cut back space on things people really need to know.”

Whereas, on the high road, one simply buries the inconvenient facts deep in the article, where no one except a hard-core critic will ever find it.

Carroll ends with this sage advice:

Carroll had a few words of advise for student journalists; he told them to pick their boss carefully.

“Don’t be lured by the money or the big name of the employer,” he said, adding that journalists should not allow their integrity to be compromised by unscrupulous employers.

“Don’t be a piano player in a whorehouse,” he said.

I agree. More specifically, don’t write for a paper that prefaces legitimate terms with “so-called” (e.g., “so-called counseling” before a “so-called partial birth abortion”) or which reflexily replaces the phrase “pro-life” with “anti-abortion,” without first checking to make sure you are even talking about abortion. Also not recommended is working for any paper that uses the phrase “assault rifle” without quotes, as that term is, when used without further qualification, highly misleading.

That’s not what Carroll meant, of course. What he really meant is that the best way to combat criticism over “liberal journalism” is to redefine it simply as “journalism.” When you mean left-wing slant, say “ethics.” And so on.

Calblog, and Patterico and Michael Williams have more. Join the party. Any other day, I’d call this a fisk-for-all. Today, it’s the mother of all fiskings (MOAF).

Cross-posted to Oh, That Liberal Media.

UPDATE: As expected, in rushes Schattenmann, to the rescue.

UPDATE: The MOAF is over, but the fisk-for-all goes on.