Fox News Senior Analyst Brit Hume tells The Brody File that mainstream media bias is "tangible" and "real" and believes that if a Republican president was at the helm during the Benghazi embassy attack the coverage by the press would be much more aggressive."
Hume tells me, "Can you imagine what the coverage would be like if this Benghazi episode would have happened with a Republican president? The coverage would be very much more aggressive. The question of what the president knew and when and how it came to pass that someone went out on a Sunday show speaking to the administration and said a whole series of things which it appears the administration knew at the time were not true . That would be very aggressively promoted and every investigative reporter in the United States would be on the case."
Brit Hume was in our Brody File studios this week and will be one of our featured guests on our weekly Brody File show airing nationwide this Friday at 9:30 a.m. ET on the ABC Family Channel. Watch the clip with him below along with the full transcription.
Mandatory Courtesy: CBN News/The Brody File
David Brody: Let me ask you about mainstream media bias. We hear this term tossed around so much. Look, I mean you’ve seen it. You’ve had different perspectives on this I’m sure, you know, obviously over at ABC, FOX and then, kind of being able to take a step back. What is your sense as to whether or not this is overblown or if this is tangible? And if it is tangible, what is the inherent systemic problem?
Brit Hume: The inherent systemic problem, and it is tangible in my view. It is real. The inherent systemic problem is most journalists lean to the left in their personal, political views. That doesn’t mean that they’re out there trying consciously in their work to influence the coverage to help one candidate or the other. They don’t. The problem is that bias is insidious. Bias is something that creeps into your work when you’re not trying hard to keep it out.
Journalists are a little bit like judges. They need to discipline themselves to look at things in a neutral way. It’s not easily done. Fairness, in my view, is not an attitude. Fairness is a skill and most journalists don’t think they need to practice the skill because they don’t think they’re biased. But you see it--can you imagine what the coverage would be like if this Benghazi episode would have happened with a Republican president? The coverage would be very much more aggressive.
The question of what the president knew and when and how it came to pass that someone went out on a Sunday show speaking to the administration and said a whole series of things which it appears the administration knew at the time were not true. That would be very aggressively promoted and every investigative reporter in the United States would be on the case. We’re not seeing that yet.
We’re seeing some improving coverage of what happened, in terms of the chain of events that led to this intelligence and security failure that opened the way for the murder of this ambassador, but what we’re not seeing is the kind of coverage of what looks like a cover up that we would have had if this were a Republican president.
That’s but one example. There are many others. The coverage of the jobs report recently was: somebody picked up a set of clips from eight years ago when there was a weak jobs report late in the campaign when President Bush was president. Oh, the coverage was negative and there were repeated mentions in all of it of how this wasn’t anywhere near enough jobs created to keep pace with the growth in the workforce. That statistic about the size of the work force and the number of jobs needed to keep pace with it, was absent from the coverage in mainstream media outlets this year.
So it just creeps in. Things look different when you have a bias and you’re not working hard to say to yourself each with every sentence you write, with everything that goes into reporting a story: Now would I be doing this the same way if the shoe were on the other foot?’ And that’s what you have to do. Too many journalists don’t do it.