Media bias is a topic we often discuss at Bold, and it’s a passion area for me. In 2005, my brother Matt founded NewsBusters, a media criticism blog calling out liberal bias that I helped him co-edit (and several years prior he also launched the successful blog RatherBiased.com calling out former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s liberal bias), so I’ve been following the anti-conservative media data for years.

Whether it’s in political donations, self-identified ideology or partisan affiliation, the mainstream, elite political press –supposedly “impartial” — overwhelmingly tilts left. This is a trend that’s been in place at least since America’s 1960s “Culture War” began.

More recently, the overwhelming negative bias against President Trump was recently highlighted in a study by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (which generously awarded me a full-tuition journalism scholarship to complete a public policy master’s degree there in 2010). As a former reporter for POLITICO, The Hill and The Washington Times, I saw this bias firsthand as well. I spoke about this bias this morning on Fox News Channel on the Fox & Friends program.

.@carriesheffield: The mainstream media is neglecting their duty to represent the public. They’ve failed to represent half of the country. pic.twitter.com/7NT3lf5ALV

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) July 10, 2017

President Trump took notice and retweeted to his nearly 34 million followers:

.@carriesheffield … You know you’ve made it when the President retweets you. ?…wait… I meant to say “you know you’re crazy when…” ? https://t.co/ObhYZ5h18d

— Clay Aiken (@clayaiken) July 10, 2017

I also recently spoke about media bias on MSNBC in light of the gruesome and graphic attacks on President Trump by celebrities like Kathy Griffin and the producers of Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. It’s mind-blowing that not just the political media establishment, but the broader cultural glitterati, doesn’t seem to realize how they are bullying the president and his followers, whipping up the Resistance through violent, unhealthy and toxic culture.

During my MSNBC debate, my sparring partner Peter Emerson said the Harvard study wasn’t credible because it didn’t include talk radio, which tilts far right. But conservative talk radio is just that–openly and freely identified as “conservative.” Outlets like ABC, CNN, The New York Times, etc., all claim to be objective and impartial, but their story selection and tone are far from this. If they would simply own their bias, or truly expunge it, then many Trump voters would feel there is a fair fight. And while yes, conservative talk radio has some financial success, the balance of advertising dollars and sponsorships tilts deeply toward these “respectable” liberal outlets. Conservative talk radio is simply a fringe niche.

Emerson also said that the widows of journalists like Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal, murdered during his investigative work in Pakistan, would be ashamed of me applauding President Trump for exposing media hypocrisy. Ironically, Emerson didn’t acknowledge that Pearl was killed by radical Islamic terrorists, the very kind that President Trump is seeking to neutralize to protect Muslims, Christians, and innocents of all faiths. I did call out the vast difference between foreign correspondents like Pearl–the types who I fought to protect while serving for years with Reporters Without Borders, a global non-profit that protects journalists–and the domestic, liberal fat cats who dominate the Beltway today. Their career trajectories couldn’t be further apart.

It is not a progressive martyr lying in a hospital bed right now; it is Rep. Steve Scalise, a Republican brutally gunned down for his political beliefs in the United States of America. The progressive fears around a Trump-led fascist state are incongruous with the fact that it is progressives who have been burning and rioting on college campuses from coast to coast.

It is not President Trump nor his followers who endorse the stifling of free speech so rampant among those of the left. It is not conservative women kicking out pro-choice women from their marches that are supposedly embracing inclusivity. With such an unfair fight against conservatives, it’s easy to feel discouraged that the possibility of an evenhanded, national conversation is out of reach.

But at Bold, we believe balance is indeed possible. We believe in true diversity: gender, racial, generational, geographic, ideological, income, etc. We believe that all voices willing to respect the physical safety of others should be heard, that all ideas should be challenged, that there is no safe space for ignorance and myopia.

We believe our personal lenses come with inherent biases that must be acknowledged and discussed, not hidden under a pretend fig leaf of objectivity. We invite you to Pop Your Bubble with us. We invite you to join the conversation around the pressing issues of our time and humanize people from all walks of life. We believe this is a bold but achievable objective.

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