The article in the Carolina Review responded to the DTH's dismissal of a writer who was also a member of the Review's staff. The writer published a cartoon in the Review lampooning the candidates for student body president while working on an election story for the DTH. The Review article questioned whether the DTH fired the writer because her beliefs were out of step with the allegedly liberal views of those managing the paper.
Kim Minugh, DTH editor-select, recently reiterated that the paper took action because the cartoon ridiculed all of the candidates in violation of the paper's conflict of interest policy. "Student elections may be the most important campus issue we cover," said Minugh. The writer's failure to alert any editors about the cartoon's contents, she said, showed poor judgment in the face of repeated admonitions to the staff about conflict concerns during election season.
"It is totally false that she was fired based on ideology," Minugh said with regard to the writer. The editor-select also rejected the notion that the paper is traditionally home to a cabal of exclusionary leftists. "While a large part of the newsroom may be liberal," she said, "many conservatives have been editor at the DTH." The paper seeks diversity, she added. "We're always game for discussion; there's nothing more that newspaper people like."
Allegations of anti-conservative bias at the DTH and other news outlets are not new. And based on the success of Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias," widespread interest exists regarding the possibility of entrenched liberalism in the country's news media. The book, currently No. 2, has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks.
A former television journalist, Goldberg described workplaces where left-leaning TV reporters approached issues with monolithic mind-sets. This resulted not in conscious attempts to manipulate stories, wrote Goldberg, but "a tendency to slant the news in a liberal way" by going to the same sources for reactions and explanations to news events. Goldberg cited a CBS Evening News producer who could not recall her network seeking on-camera comment from conservative women's groups. "Why is it that the media elites aren't nearly as cozy with the anti-affirmative action or pro-life lobbies?" Goldberg wrote.
In a January interview in Editor & Publisher magazine, Goldberg said that his "Bias" analysis was equally applicable to print journalism. He mentioned a Freedom Forum and Roper poll of Washington reporters that revealed only four percent identified themselves as Republicans.
The recently released Carolina Poll reveals a lack of confidence in local media. Almost one-third of respondents reported that they trusted "only some" of what's in area newspapers (the DTH was not included in the poll's list of papers). Almost 50 percent declared they trusted "most" of what they read. Based on my utterly unscientific assessment of the respondents with whom I spoke during my three-hour Carolina Poll calling stint two weeks ago, the perception that area papers have a liberal agenda is the principal source of this skepticism. Although this year's poll targeted only Triangle residents, presumably home to more liberal folks than many other areas of the state, no potential Erskine Bowles staffers were on my call sheet.
Jock Lauterer, a DTH alumnus, former newspaper publisher and director of the Carolina Community Media Project, said recently that he is not surprised by surveys indicating the media's leftward tilt. A 1967 UNC graduate, Lauterer worked at the DTH during the era that many conservatives still think led to the unwinding of America's moral fabric. "We understood that we were not supposed to be demonstrating," Lauterer said recently with regard to the student protests of his day, "but we demonstrated by our coverage." He said the 1963 Speaker Ban Law, which barred Communist party members from speaking at North Carolina's public universities, was particularly unpopular at the paper.
Minugh said she is committed to both intellectual and physical diversity at the DTH. "I'd like to recruit more minorities to the paper," she said, "especially the edit board." She understands that editorial board meetings include vigorous political debates across ideological sides (as managing editor, Minugh is not part of those gatherings), but, "It's majority male and all white."
