“Are lying liberals destroying the country?” asked a mocking
Arthel Neville, host of CNN’s “Talkback Live,” before interviewing
Ann Coulter on Thursday.
The segment with Coulter quickly degenerated into straw-man
silliness, with Neville characterizing Coulter’s position in the
most overstated terms. “So all liberals are guilty of bashing
conservatives?” a perturbed Neville asked Coulter.
Julian Epstein, the Democratic lawyer who should keep a cot at
CNN given the frequency of his appearances, was invited to join the
fray, declaring that Coulter’s position lacked “empirical
evidence.”
The show became three against one: Epstein, CNN’s audience, and
Neville versus Coulter.
Liberal bias in the media? Oh no. What an untenable position.
Sure, “Talkback Live” is a conveyor belt of liberal foolishness,
but that’s not “empirical evidence” of Coulter’s point.
That some 90 percent of reporters voted for Bill Clinton
apparently isn’t “empirical evidence” either. Or that Coulter’s
book, like Bernard Goldberg’s book before it, has shot up to the
top of bestseller lists.
Fortunately, not all members of the liberal media find Coulter’s
point as mystifying as Epstein and Neville. Here and there liberal
journalists are conceding the existence of bias. And even if they
don’t agree that it is a problem, they are at least pragmatic
enough to see that the American people consider it a problem, and
therefore they must change or watch their business decline.
In a little-noticed story, the Los Angeles Times
recently fired a reporter after he fired off an intemperate e-mail
to Republican Congressman Bill Thomas. Brian Robin, a sportswriter
for a community edition of the paper, used the Times’s
e-mail system to deliver his left-wing musings. (Thomas’s staff
apparently brought the note to the attention of Robin’s
superiors).
“Surely, you can’t be that stupid,” began the e-mail. “I mean,
even for the standards of the current Republican Party, which has
turned from the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into a
hateful, dogmatic and uncompromising group (except in the case of
big business, when you become the party of Stepin Fetchit), your
comments on CNN are so completely out of line, they defy logic.
“To blame Bill Clinton (our last legally elected president) for
the current corporate shenanigans completely flies in the face of
truth and logic. The president you and your ilk impeached for lying
about oral sex presided over a country that lowered teen pregnancy
rates 22 percent, dropped the crime rate by roughly the same amount
and knocked nearly half the welfare recipients off the rolls. While
those numbers were dropping, so were the numbers in divorce, teen
drinking, teen suicide and abortion. But that doesn’t jibe with
your partisan rantings…
“Without a scintilla of regret or moral thought, your party has
embraced corporate crooks, polluters and other moral rot. It wasn’t
Bill Clinton who cooked books at Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom
and who knows how many other companies.
“It wasn’t Bill Clinton who engaged in accounting fraud while
working as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company (see Cheney, Dick). It
wasn’t Bill Clinton who engaged in insider trading while leading
yet another company into bankruptcy (see Bush, G.W.).
“It was Bill Clinton who lied about a blow job. Somehow, I don’t
see the comparison. Then again, I’m not a morally bankrupt
Republican congressman who opts for partisanship ahead of
truth.”
Back in the salad days of the liberal media, the discovery of
such a note on the Times’s e-mail system might have paved
Robin’s path to an editorial page post. But in the post-Fox news
climate, with anger at the liberal media running high, the Los
Angeles Times management felt the need to dump Robin without
debate.
They don’t want that note cited as empirical evidence against
them.
