didn t say that i had contended that pressured push for gun control and here s what you wrote, put it up on the screen. it involves acting as a crusading vanguard while denying often self reichesly that anything of the sort is happening. the trouble is that when you set out to lead a conversation, it s important for journalists whether you like the phrase, leading the conversation or not, push controversial issues that the politicians otherwise might prefer not to talk about. yeah, no, i think that s fair and i also think it s fair. look, journalists, you know, it s a hard job. right? the idea that there is a sort of perfect, unbias position from which to cover the news is of n often, you know, it s oft aen not not achievable. act as stenographers. john boehner said this, experts say this. the harder thing to do when the
sacred text. i think in sort of, again, not in sort of the to and fro of politics, but how the press portrayed it. again, i liked a lot of things about that document. i m not totally sorry the press played it that way. but i think you see that happening again and again. there is sort of a desire for, there is a desire for a figure like michael bloomberg to sort of play this sort of postpartisan role, but that then intersects with the press social issues. when a figure like bloomberg is mixing it up on guns, he gets to be a bipartisan, postpartisan figure and the press gets to sort of congratulate itself for being the history of vanguard. that is hard for me to get my mind around. let me turn to the column you wrote in new york times and picked up something you wrote for daily beast. i said gun control was an important issue and the press has to be leading the conversation on this and i
thanks for having me. the gun control debate, the background check legislation that went down in the senate, you see that as a classic example of media bias, media rooting for certain outcomes. is that fair? i think it s a little more complicated than that. i think it s a situation where the press likes to feel like they re in the vanguard of history on certain issues, right? those are usually social issues and issues like gun control, gay marriage and so on. i think those are the places where, you know, a lot of people in the press walk a very fine line between sort of trying to report nucherally and also trying to, you know, be on the winning side and on social issues i think they tend to fall off that tight rope a little bit. to the point of unfairness sometimes. yes, to the point of unfairness quite a bit. for example, senators joe manchin and pat toumy and there was so much attention to that legislation and the day after it
didn t get the 60 votes your newspaper the new york times said it did not have a chance. why were we given the impression it had? the vanguard of the press role and the fact that it did have bipartisan support. i think that s the other, there is also a media bias towards bipartisanship, right? because when something is bipartisan, it lets journalists who are, again, trying to sort of place things down the middle be able to sort of root for an outcome. look, it s bipartisan, we re not taking sides. but it gives a kind of protective cover to say we re not in the camp of one party or the other. well, think about how the press covered the bowles-simpson deficit plan. i like the bowles-simpson deficit plan. that s how america reacted maybe. but there was a sort of sense that because this was a bipartisan document that it made sense to treat it as a kind of