A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

As the 110th Congress desperately seeks popularity, it can rest assured that the media will be helpful to those who run Congress nowadays:

A CNN reporter gave $500 to John Kerry's campaign the same month he was embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq. An assistant managing editor at Forbes magazine not only sent $2,000 to Republicans, but also volunteers as a director of an ExxonMobil-funded group that questions global warming. A junior editor at Dow Jones Newswires gave $1,036 to the liberal group MoveOn.org and keeps a blog listing "people I don't like," starting with George Bush, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, the NRA and corporate America ("these are the people who are really in charge").

Whether you sample your news feed from ABC or CBS (or, yes, even NBC and MSNBC), whether you prefer Fox News Channel or National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, some of the journalists feeding you are also feeding cash to politicians, parties or political action committees.

MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

The donations will supposedly come to a halt in many of the news organizations. But does anyone actually believe that this will keep journalists from writing ideologically skewed reports? I mean, we even get the "Bush is Hitler" comment from one of the interviewees:

"Probably there should be a rule against [donations from reporters]," said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine's profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. "But there's a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler -- a journalist interviewing him had murdered him -- the world would be a better place. I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don't regret it."

So, you see, donating to Democrats is like violating rules against murder. But since Bush is Hitler, that's fine. Or something.

And some journalists are twisted into pretzels--you know, the food that nearly killed Hitler Bush--in trying to rationalize their quasi-political activity:

Guy Raz does work for a news organization.

As the Jerusalem correspondent for CNN, he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq in June 2004, when he gave $500 to John Kerry.

He didn't supply his occupation or employer to the Kerry campaign, so his donation is listed in federal records with only his name and London address. Now he covers the Pentagon for NPR. Both CNN and NPR forbid political activity.

"I covered international news and European Union stories. I did not cover U.S. news or politics," Raz said in an e-mail to MSNBC.com. When asked how one could define U.S. news so it excludes the U.S. war in Iraq, Raz didn't reply.

But he thought really hard about an answer.

Some journalists reach for existential reasons to justify their campaign contributions:

. . . The last bulwark against bias's slipping into The New Yorker is the copy department, whose chief editor, Ann Goldstein, gave $500 in October to MoveOn.org, which campaigns for Democrats and against President Bush. "That's just me as a private citizen," she said. As for whether donations are allowed, Goldstein said she hadn't considered it. "I've never thought of myself as working for a news organization."

She's right. Amy Goldstein works for a fast food joint.

This is fun. Let's excerpt some more:

[Margot] Patterson has covered the Iraq war and anti-war movements for the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly newspaper in Kansas City.

She gave to anti-war Democrats: $2,100 to Sen. Claire McCaskill, $1,000 to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, $250 to Howard Dean and $800 to the Democratic Party.

And she signed a petition and paid to have it published as "KC Metro Citizens Oppose War On Iraq!"

Patterson said the danger isn't the journalist who reveals a bias by making a campaign contribution, but journalists who quietly hold to their biases.

"I feel my responsibility as a journalist is to be fair to the people and issues involved and to be as accurate as possible," she said. "When I see my country embark on a course of action that I think disastrous to its future and fatal to its citizens, I think it my duty to do my utmost to stop it."

She didn't disclose her political activities to her readers, or her editor, Tom Roberts. He said he wasn't sure about campaign contributions, but "a reporter signing a petition crosses the line to activism."

You. Don't. Say.

This is a lovely story because it undercuts Eric Alterman. If it did only that, it would be worth highlighting. It does more than that, of course, but the following passage is just nothing short of delicious:

At this point, we need a journalism ethicist. How about Orville Schell? He favorably reviewed Eric Alterman's book "What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News." And this Feb. 9, while he was still dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, Schell gave $1,000 to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Or we could ask Randy Cohen, who writes the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for The New York Times. The former comedy writer gave $585 to MoveOn.org in 2004 when it was organizing get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bush. Cohen said he understands the Times policy and won't make donations again, but he had thought of MoveOn.org as no more out of bounds than the Boy Scouts.

"We admire those colleagues who participate in their communities -- help out at the local school, work with Little League, donate to charity," Cohen said in an e-mail. "But no such activity is or can be non-ideological. Few papers would object to a journalist donating to the Boy Scouts or joining the Catholic Church. But the former has an official policy of discriminating against gay children; the latter has views on reproductive rights far more restrictive than those of most Americans. Should reporters be forbidden to support those groups? I'd say not."

Moveon.org:Boy Scouts::Bush:Hitler. I get this now!

Leave it to Tom Rosentiel to explain the obvious:

Tom Rosenstiel hasn't given anyone a dime. The former media critic for The Los Angeles Times and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, he co-wrote the classic book "The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect."

Journalists have sometimes gone too far, Rosenstiel said, in withdrawing from civic life. "Is it a conflict of interest for the food editor to be the president of the PTA? Probably not," he said. "You don't want to make your journalists be zoo animals."

But giving money to a candidate or party, he said, goes a big step beyond voting. "If you give money to a candidate, you are then rooting for that candidate. You've made an investment in that candidate. It can make it more difficult for someone to tell the news without fear or favor.

"The second reason," Rosenstiel said, "it would create -- even if you thought you could make that intellectual leap and not let your personal allegiance interfere with your professionalism -- it creates an appearance of a conflict of interest. For journalists, that's a real conflict.

"Giving money, you're not doing the profession of journalism any good. All of the ethics of journalism are about trust. They don't come from Planet Journalism. They come from the street."

For all of the Democratic Presidential candidates who are bound and determined to boycott any efforts by Fox News to host a Democratic debate, you might want to reconsider:

Fox News Channel is alone among the four major TV networks in placing no restrictions on campaign contributions. But there were surprises in the records for those who think everyone at Fox is a Republican. Researcher Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."

Laura Evans, anchor at the Fox station in Washington, gave to a Democratic candidate and blogs about the war.

At the Fox station in Washington, WTTG, anchor Laura Evans gave $500 in August to Democrat John Sarbanes, who was elected to the House from suburban Maryland. She initially told MSNBC.com that the donation was made by her husband, lobbyist Mike Manatos.

But the records show that her husband had already given the legal limit to Sarbanes. When asked about those records in a follow-up interview, she said, "I hadn't talked to my husband. He reminded me that he had actually talked to me about this, because he had maxed out, could we write a check in my name. I said, sure. Now I remember having this conversation. It's within Fox policy, it was OK for me to do it."

Evans has also taken stands in line with Rep. Sarbanes' votes opposing President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq. On her blog on WTTG's Web site, she commented recently on the congressional debate: "Everyone's trying to save face here ... all the while people are dying. Didn't voters in November speak loud and clear, saying they're tired of the fighting and want an end in sight?"

Roger Ailes is doubtless displeased. And be careful about thinking like a lawyer. It could get you into some big trouble:

At ABC News, "Primetime" correspondent Mary Fulginiti gave $500 this February to Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate. The legal correspondent had been a white-collar defense attorney until she joined ABC in November. She said the donation "is not a reflection of my political views," although she had given regularly to Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. "Look, I've made a mistake here," she said. "I'm a legal analyst -- this is all new to me. I have been politically active in the past. This is when I was just starting out at ABC. I was still thinking as a lawyer."

Er . . . okay.

I trust that reports like this will convince even the most obstreperous that there is bias in the media, that it leans heavily to one side and that we may not be getting the best of reporting thanks to that bias.

Well, of course the most obstreperous will continue to deny the obvious. But that doesn't mean the rest of us can't. And with the rise of the alternative media in full swing and with investigative blogs that differ ideologically and philosophically from the mainstream media determined to dig deeper and find media bias wherever it exists, there is no reason that we cannot critique and condemn the mainstream media for the dishonesty that it has shown in trying ever-so-desperately to hide its overwhelming bias. We, as consumers, deserved better than the media gave us.