Re: Is the media geographically biased?

Description: Most journalists, Kuhn says, want the facts to steer the story.

Transcript: You know I often think that people make mistakes in just touting the media as liberal.  Because demographics . . . Demographics explain a lot of the bias in coverage.  And I don’t mean bias in the sense of preset theses.  In other words, most reporters . . . The vast majority of reporters never go into a story with an idea of how the story must come out.  They really do go into a story with the hope and ambition – however flawed it sometimes can be – to let the facts steer the story – the interviews, the quotes, the data, whatever.  But I do think because so many . . . so much of the national media is based here in New York City, and Washington, D.C. and a little in L.A., that there is an urban bias, definitely.  And it’s not as if they’re . . . it’s so clearly condescending to rural America.  But inevitably if you’re in a city, you can never quite understand the effect of outsourcing on sort of a regular man when the factory goes and the town is left destroyed; and what that does to his family and his wife who may have lost her job as well on some industry that was related to that factory.  And you can never fully understand what that does to that family and how it might destroy the marriage; and why that family might suddenly veer towards divorce; and why that daughter is more likely to be pregnant than if she was raised in, you know, sort of in a city.  Not in the urban hard aspects of many of these cities, but certainly Republican red states if you will have higher teen pregnancy rates.  They have high divorce rates – sometimes dramatically higher.  And part of this emphasis on values . . . on moral values is not because these people necessarily think they’re more moral.  This is what liberals sometimes get wrong.  It’s that they often see a need for moral imperative in their lives because many families around them are breaking down.

Recorded on: 2/5/08