I first met Harry Stein on the pages of Esquire magazine, when he was writing fascinating articles about ethics. Since that time, he has chronicled his transformation from a 1960s-style liberal to a modern neo-conservative.

As a member of The Poynter Institute's national advisory board, he has challenged the institute to confront popular discontent with the media, the kind that has turned the book Bias, by Bernie Goldberg, into a national bestseller.

In the following e-mail exchange, Harry lays the groundwork for understanding the conservative critique of media bias, and perhaps some other critiques as well.

Harry Stein

1. Can you summarize the conservative critique that the news media are biased?

I continue to be amazed that a case that strikes many of us as self-evident needs to be endlessly restated. But, for the record, the critique is this: The media, notably certain powerful big city dailies and the network news divisions that generally follow their lead, reflect a worldview that is not only distinctly liberal in character, but hostile to those who hold alternative views.

This most routinely and vividly shows itself in the coverage of so-called "hot button issues" involving race, sexuality and gender. On emotionally wrenching issues of enormous moral complexity such as abortion and affirmative action, the media tends -- sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly -- to champion the liberal position and disparage the conservative one.

On reflection, that such a reality seems invisible to many in the press is less remarkable than it might seem. Above all, it is a matter of shared assumptions. Go to a party with a bunch of journalists on New York's Upper West Side and you can be pretty sure that most everyone feels pretty much the same way on a broad range of contentious issues. They will be pro-choice and pro-affirmative action and pro-gay marriage.

More to the point, they will regard these positions as not merely sensible (and moderate), but also fair, honorable and humane. Thus, they will see those who hold opposing views as not merely mistaken (and extreme) but also -- pick your epithet, let's not pretend we haven't heard them -- bigoted, mean-spirited, selfish, and heartless.

Many will argue, even while conceding much of the above, that as journalists they routinely set their personal views aside. As a liberal, I used to say that, and more or less believed it. It was only when I found myself on the other side of some of these issues that it became evident how wrong that is. As John Stossel, who's made a similar journey, recently noted, "Asking someone in the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water."

There's hardly the space here to enumerate in detail the ways the bias shows itself. That much of it is unconscious and inadvertent is hardly reassuring; it only makes it harder for even well intentioned journalists to identify and address. How, for instance, do you even begin to persuade a reporter who considers herself a feminist, and for years has cast the National Organization for Women as speaking for American women, that it just ain't so?

2. How would you explain the emergence of Fox news, and the popularity of books such as Bernie Goldberg's Bias?

Many, many, many people, literally millions, have grown accustomed to seeing their values and beliefs routinely caricatured and belittled by the media. They also resent being endlessly preached to about tolerance and diversity by a media that conspicuously fails to practice the former and defines the latter as encompassing skin tone but not thought.

This is pretty elementary, though evidently the brass at the network news divisions and places like The New York Times still don't get it.

Fox and Bernard Goldberg do.

Having seen the problem from within, Goldberg merely confirms what his many viewers long ago discerned sitting in their living rooms. But the credibility he brings to the argument as a whistle blower has made him the beneficiary of great appreciation and gratitude. For its part, Fox obviously addressed a glaring need. Liberals like to sneer at their slogan, 'We report, you decide,' and, yes, of course Murdoch's network has a conservative bias. But I would also maintain that Fox's reputation for partisanship is grounded at least partly in the reality that it is the only major broadcast outlet that routinely gives social conservatives, as well as liberals, an opportunity to fully air their views.

This may come as a shock to those raised on CBS, NBC, and ABC, but it also makes for a plausible argument that, in fact, Fox is more balanced than the big three. The only genuinely neutral forum on the tube is C-Span, truly a national treasure.

3. Does the bias you perceive exist in media everywhere, or just in the big media in the Northeast?

Certainly, big media sets the tone. Still, on the basis of what I've seen and heard (some of it at Poynter), people from smaller market towns tend to be a good deal more open to honest discussion on the issue of bias, and less ready to regard such a conversation as threatening. In many cases, they've had spirited debates about bias in their own newsrooms-- often, I'm told, prompted by reader complaints.

The fact that the most important media outlets are based in the most liberal town in America not called San Francisco, and that the journalists who serve these outlets tend to have less than regular contact with a broad spectrum of Americans undoubtedly exacerbates the problem.

Would the network news really be the same if it were produced out of Indianapolis?

4. What do you think is the source (or sources) of such bias?

Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world. That's certainly why I was drawn to the profession, and I know many of my friends who likewise emerged from the anti-war and Civil Rights movements into the mainstream felt the same way.

This is not on the face of it a bad thing; social justice is a noble aspiration. But it inevitably casts one as a partisan.

It may be that this wasn't so bad when the issues were clearer cut. In his book, Bernie Goldberg acknowledges that while covering Civil Rights, he too found it impossible to pretend to neutrality. Given the moral weight of the issues at hand and personalities involved, how could he?

Today, the issues are immeasurably more complex. You're dealing not with Martin Luther King, but Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, not with the denial of basic rights but with affirmative action. The old assumptions about good guys and bad generally don't apply or, at any rate, shouldn't.

This is something far too many journalists, in their approach to complex social issues, still don't seem to grasp.

5. News organizations are becoming smaller parts of bigger and bigger corporations. Wouldn't you expect that the corporate cultures of big businesses would be politically and culturally conservative rather than liberal?

This is an interesting point, and of course the one made insistently by those seemingly unable to see before them. The simple fact is, corporations are not ideological -- or, more precisely, their ideology is avoiding trouble and maximizing profits. Thus it was, for instance, that GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination) was able to get Proctor and Gamble among other prominent sponsors to withdraw their advertising from conservative commentator Dr. Laura Schlessinger's radio show.

On the media front, corporate owners of networks have made a policy of not interfering with news divisions. Indeed, in the midst of his initial public wrangle with CBS, Goldberg got a note from Michael Jordan -- the other one, who headed Westinghouse, then-owner of CBS -- informing him that he agreed with Goldberg's critique of CBS news. But that had no effect on the way Dan Rather, CBS news president Andrew Heyward, et. al., did business.

6. Critics from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, deride the news media as champions of the status quo. They argue that the media limit the public debate to the narrowest range of opinions. Do they have a point?

Absolutely. From Chomsky's perspective, the media indeed are exclusionary. Anti-WTO types certainly aren't given much of a forum, nor are hard left critics of American foreign policy. Ralph Nader was excluded from the presidential debates with nary a whimper of protest. The difference between his beef and conservatives' is that, as even he would almost certainly acknowledge, the radical (or, if you prefer, radically populist) thinking he represents has only a tiny following. Conservatives are more or less half the population.

7. The New York Times seemed to be pretty tough on Bill Clinton over the years. Would that contradict an opinion that the Times exhibits liberal bias?

Not at all. A couple of points here:

1. Again -- and this cannot be overstated -- the argument is far less about personalities or even politics than cultural attitudes. A good scandal is always blood sport for journalists, no matter who's on the receiving end; and Clinton, with astonishingly casual attitudes about morality and truth, was a one-man scandal machine. In that sense, he was a godsend.
2. Frankly, some journalists -- among them, people at The Times -- didn't much like Clinton for ideological reasons. Lest we forget, this was the guy who went for welfare reform and reneged on gays in the military. And as time went on, more than a few journalists came to resent the ways in which the Clintons used them.
3. Still, I would argue that when push truly came to shove, the media (very much including The Times) was there for Clinton. Even all this time later, I'm astonished that a scandal that serious people knew to be about perjury and obstruction of justice was relentlessly portrayed as being about sex. (Yes, it was bad law that enabled prosecutors in the Paula Jones case to rummage around in Clinton's past and find Monica Lewinsky; but, lest we forget, it was feminist-inspired law signed by Bill Clinton).