John Dickerson: Thinking about press bias

Time, CBS, and Slate veteran John Dickerson has spent a lifetime in Washington, D.C. I interviewed him this spring as he was about to take over hosting CBS’s Sunday morning interview show Face the Nation. Here are his thoughts on some perceptions of liberal reporters.

Christian conservatives are talking a lot about religious freedom for bakers and photographers and others. That argument doesn’t seem to resonate with many in the press. If it becomes civil rights versus pizzas and cakes, you’re on the wrong end of that conversation. If it becomes a question of, “These are my deeply held views that give structure to my life. This is the core of who I am,” that becomes something a person on the other side in terms of the same-sex marriage debate could understand. But it rarely gets to that.

What’s hard to understand about the difference between discrimination against people—I’m not going to serve you a hamburger, drink from this water fountain, stay in this hotel—and discrimination in regard to particular events? From their point of view it is against people, something they desperately want is being kept from them. For them it’s just as intensely personal, because from that point of view it’s “This is who I am,” and for many of them, “This is the way God made me, so who are you to deny me the love that I feel for another person?” If the public debate were about this personal place, it’s at least a little bit more respectful.

Will the religious freedom argument ever be a winning argument for conservative evangelicals? What about the T-shirt maker who doesn’t want to print shirts with a particular slogan with which he disagrees, and he has a history of turning down some business for that reason. He doesn’t see himself as a public utility. He sees this as part of his freedom of speech, which includes freedom not to speak. Would that resonate more with journalists who don’t really care about religion but they do care about freedom of speech and freedom of the press? That might be, yes. Still, explaining from a personal standpoint is the only way I can think of for bringing this conversation out of the heated place that it is. A lot of these issues on both sides have been used to rally and rile up voters in a way that gets people elected. When a conversation’s happening in that context, everybody is right to be skeptical of motives.

Does ideology sometimes lead to an unwillingness to connect the dots, if that will help conservative Republicans? No. The biggest weakness journalists have is that they want a story. So, a story of chaos, and what Hillary Clinton has to answer for and explain with Libya, gets covered extensively.

But that’s now. In the middle of a campaign featuring a liberal candidate against a conservative candidate, is the heat on to not do something that could potentially capsize the liberal candidate? I don’t know.

Do a lot of liberal reporters hope that Elizabeth Warren will jump into the presidential race? I think the liberal influence in the mainstream media is more subtle—some people would say insidious. There aren’t many people with Elizabeth Warren posters on their walls. The number of people in the press who want Elizabeth Warren to run because it would be actual competition and a story to cover and a battle of ideas far outweighs, by a huge number, the number of people who want her because of whatever she believes. The sin and fault of many reporters may be that they have no ideology. They don’t believe anything. That can be its own frightening view of the world.

See also “John Dickerson: Should Obama pulverize conservatives?”