NBC's Savannah Guthrie shrugs off bias accusations against journalists in conversation with Monica Lewinsky
Lewinsky, who hosts the weekly podcast "Reclaiming" and is friends with the longtime morning show host, praised Guthrie for doing her job with integrity and wondered how she works to keep her personal and political views to herself.
"It's interesting in our world now that there will be people, probably people listening right now, who might say 'Oh well she isn't dispassionate at all,'" Guthrie said. "You know, bias is really in the eye of the beholder. All I can tell you is what I try to do, which is to be straightforward, to be accurate, to be fair, to be precise. We used to say it's 'down the middle,' but it's not really, it's more nuanced than that."
"There is no 'down the middle,'" Lewinsky said.
"It's not down the middle," Guthrie said. "It's not like you do a story, and you say, 'Some say the sun came up this morning, others say it didn't.' That would be wrong, that would be factually incorrect."
Guthrie joked it was "adorable" how there used to be normal policy disagreements in politics, but now things had become "so personal."
While Guthrie and Lewinsky didn't specifically discuss accusations of liberal bias against the industry, her rhetoric about not simply covering both sides evenly all the time was reminiscent of recent arguments from other mainstream journalists.
In 2021, Guthrie's NBC colleague Lester Holt was praised in liberal media circles for saying, "I think it's become clear that fairness is overrated ... the idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in."
His remarks were widely interpreted as not giving equal shrift to conservatives and Trump supporters for the sake of fairness.
Outside the media, Guthrie also questioned whether there is an inherent bias from news viewers who may be looking for their beliefs to be confirmed by those reporting the news.
"What I would just challenge people to think about when they are analyzing — whether you're again, consider yourself of the left or the right or whatever you are — is when you're identifying bias in the people that you are receiving your news from, just to ponder and ask yourself whether it is your bias that is determining that the person you're receiving the news from is biased," she proposed.
Guthrie continued, saying that the bias some viewers claim to see may actually be their own and that everyone is now a "couch media critic."
"Maybe the bias that you're feeling is that you wish that you were watching someone who agreed with your view of the world and that's okay," she contended.
"But you're hearing something different, and you know … we live in a time, where everyone's kind of a couch media critic and I think there's good things about that because it challenges everyone to be better — and then there's some parts about it that just really aren't on the level, and it's not an honest critique," Guthrie added.
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