Conservatives have long complained about a liberal bias in the mainstream media. President Trump has (as with so much else) taken that line of attack to its illogical and extreme conclusion: the news is “fake” and some reporters are “dishonest” and “scum.”
Still, just because Trump says something doesn’t mean it’s entirely wrong—not the fake or dishonest or (for Pete’s sake) scum parts, but the bias. As with racial bias in schools, it may be implicit, but it’s there nonetheless.
Three examples from the past twenty-four hours. First, Marketplace dedicated more than three minutes of limited airtime to a discussion about Los Angeles Unified’s initiative to purchase chickens for their school lunches that meet specified “labor and production standards.” (This was inspired by a Los Angeles Times story on the same subject.) This is more important than, say, LA Unified’s war on charter schools, or its high-profile, union-rigged, school board election—or, I don’t know, its inability to help its own students meet specified learning standards?
Then there was National Public Radio’s puff piece on Exeter’s and Andover’s decisions to create gender-neutral dorms, complete with proud alumni boasting about their alma maters’ “very significant and positive step.” Can you come up with a better caricature of east-coast liberal elitism than private high schools with billion dollar endowments and students from around the world embracing the latest progressive orthodoxy? Why exactly did NPR decide this was newsworthy?
Strike three was the reporting this week on a new report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce finding that, as Inside Higher Ed put it, “Selective Colleges Reject Qualified Pell Recipients.” Eighty-six thousand such recipients, to be exact.* The study also got picked up by the Hechinger Report, the CNN wire, and some of the other trade publications, but none of the big outlets. Do, however, note the kicker in the IHE article: “Pell recipients who score above the median on the SAT (1120) but do not attend a selective college are overwhelmingly white.”
That’s right: Tens of thousands of poor white kids are being rejected by selective-admissions universities. As in: Trump voters, J.D. Vances, and the sons and daughters of the forgotten men and women. Maybe—I’m just speculating here—in part because of race-based affirmative action. AND THIS WAS NOT CONSIDERED NEWSWORTHY BY THE NATIONAL PRESS? Or worth mentioning by any outlet that covered the study except for IHE? Holy blind spot, Batman!
Now to be clear, I myself am a Whole Foods Republican. Or what others might call a RINO, even a sellout. I like my free-range chicken as much as the next guy (maybe more). I’m happy to see schools make life safe for transgender kids. Heck, I heard the Marketplace and NPR stories while commuting home on my bike, overlooking the sparkling Potomac River, on a trail paid by your federal tax dollars. In other words, I’m in the bubble, too. Inside the Beltway also, most of the time.
But come on, people. This is embarrassing. Perhaps the fault lies not with the reporters, but with their editors. Bias is a much bigger problem than a single beat. Still, I’m confident the media can do better at tracking what matters in education.
* Update May 5, 2017, at 3:25 pm: The study was subtitled "Selective Colleges Can Afford to Admit More Pell Grant Recipients," and its press release quoted CEW director Anthony Carnevale as saying that "Highly-qualified Pell Grant students are being turned away from the opportunity for an elite college education." That led me—and the Inside Higher Education headline writer, apparently—to believe that the study looked at admissions decisions. It did not. Carnevale just emailed me to admit that "we do not have data about how many students were rejected by selected colleges vs. how many did not apply." He went on to write, "I believe the answer for why these Pell Grant recipients are not attending selective colleges lies somewhere between Carolyn Hoxby's research (they never applied) and Stephen Burd's research (selective colleges give more merit aid to students they really want and leave high-achieving but low-income students with an unbridgeable gulf in financial aid, so they may get in but don't attend).
