Guest speaker - Blog #6

We had a great special treat today in class; Judge Ralph Erickson the president of the Malibu Democrats enlightened the class on politics from the grassroots perspective. Erickson is a retired federal judge, a former SEC investigator and Democratic Party activist. The hour and ten minute talk covered many issues from his history, dealing with reporters, how community/state politics function and a wide array of historical context.

Erickson's first memories of journalism began early in his life, hearing radio accounts of the Hindenburg disaster and live broadcasts of Hitler speaking. This 75-year-old veteran is a voracious reader of newspapers and has developed many relationships with journalists. Erickson is the type of reader that newspapers adore - he receives three daily and two weeklies, and he reads them all.

The reader has also become active in journalism education; he has spoken at conferences held specifically for investigative reporters and editors. While working for the SEC in Los Angeles, Erickson worked extensively with reporters from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. I really appreciated the stories he shared with the class about the crazy antics of the reporters he worked with, especially the Wall Street Journal reporters.

After hearing about Erickson's history and background we had some class discussion on political slants of newspapers. Bias in newspapers is extremely hard to judge because most news stories and just news stories and most op-ed or staff ed's are clearly opinions.

The best example of political bias that I see in most newspaper is reading the difference in AP or big stories in the Wall Street Journal and in the Los Angeles Times. My dad handed me two front pages one day and said read these two stories. Both stories were an AP story about the economy, one was published in USA Today and the other was in I believe the LA Times or the Washington Post. The AP story was about an economic study that was released. The overall findings of the study showed that the economy was stronger than it has ever been. The USA Today story leads with the positive outlook on the economy. The other newspaper rewrote the lead to focus on one of the negative things that study found and changed the tone of the story to be about inflation rate rising at a dramatic pace. These were both true and both news but one editor picked to ignore a part of the story while the other covered the entire story. One was biased.

One of my favorite books on bias is just that, Bias, by Bernard Goldberg. This CBS insider wrote a great book that detailed the daily bias he saw in his own newsroom. Goldberg is a democrat but he saw that the most common and subversive form of bias in the news is in the identification of people. Any comment, statement or fact coming from a conservative group was clearly identified as coming from a conservative group. Comments, statements and fact that came from the left were usually not identified as coming from the left. This was usually done on accident by the reporter because they share the same opinions with the left side and view those as facts and hence do not need to be identified in the same way.

The other interesting topic of discussion in class was the power of politics. Erickson said that to be a politician a person has to be able to change power structures. He led with an example of his grandson being a great politician because he is able to get his mom to do anything he wants.

The scary aspect of this part of the discussion was that money controls almost every aspect of politics, which is something everyone knows but few are willing to admit. Erickson said that in politics "you buy committee chairmanships or for the less funded you buy seats on important committees."