The American Spectator

Media Matters

The Bias Bully

By K.E. Grubbs Jr. on 6.9.03 @ 12:03AM

A special review of Eric Alterman's
What Liberal Media? The Truth About BIAS and the News
(Basic Books, 322 pages, $25).

So Eric Alterman shoves off in his leaky little vessel, its bold mission to neutralize the conservative attack on the liberal media by the likes of Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter. He dips his oar and comes up with this:

Republicans of all stripes have done quite well for themselves during the last five decades fulminating about the liberal cabal/progressive thought-police who spin, supplant, and sometimes suppress the news we all consume. Indeed, it's not only conservatives who find this whipping boy to be an irresistible target. Dwight David Eisenhower received one of the biggest ovations of his life when, at the 1952 Republican convention, he derided the "sensation-seeking columnists and commentators" who sought to undermine the Republican Party's efforts to improve the nation.

What's wrong with that statement?

For starters, the sloppy, nonfactual history. The GOP convention Alterman describes -- the one in which likable Ike, then more than three years out of the White House, lambasted the pundits, much to the delight of the assembled Goldwater delegates -- actually took place in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Four.

That was on page one.

On page two he writes that smart conservatives don't really "believe their own grumbles." He cites James Baker, who avowed that he couldn't find reason to complain about the media. And Pat Buchanan, who "found that he could not identify any allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential candidacies."

Sigh. To put it bluntly, the ever-avuncular Baker, during his heyday, was the most famous press-stroker in Washington. He's not going to start complaining now that he's got memoirs to sell and speaking fees to collect.

As for Buchanan -- please. The man who's spent the last decade trying to redefine conservatism as populist isolationism was running against the first President Bush. The media pumped him. If he doesn't understand the dynamic, I do. When, in August 1992, as editorial director of the Orange County Register, I called on President Bush to decline a re-election bid, ABC News sent a limo to deliver me to its Los Angeles studio, there to make my case on Nightline. For the rest of the campaign season the world's media -- and I do mean the world's media -- trooped through my Santa Ana office as if I were an oracle. My 15 minutes were up on Election Day.

Was I or some mysterious force on my behalf "working the ref," as Alterman quotes a GOP operative of admitting he does, the idea being to "cow" the liberal media into not being so liberal? Of course not, but note how the premise of this notion accepts a dominantly liberal media.

The story line was not hard to discern. I was the influential editorialist from Southern California's most notoriously conservative county. If I expressed opposition to the Republican president -- importantly, I wrote a fortnight before the national convention -- then the president was in trouble, as indeed he was. He needed California, which meant he depended on the electoral heft of Orange County. The next day Al Gore swept into town, announcing he wanted to visit the place where that marvelous editorial was published, never mind that the editorial heaped special scorn on the Clinton/Gore ticket.

So, sure, conservatives have enjoyed success by clobbering the media, or by using the media as they used them, but Alterman doesn't begin to grasp why. They've enjoyed success as ju-jitsu masters: by using the dominant media culture's left-of-center weight against itself. Hilariously, Alterman, media critic for the loony left magazine, The Nation, spends much of the rest of his text arguing that the media aren't truly liberal because they don't buy into his own extreme form of liberalism.

JUST WHO IS ERIC Alterman, anyway? Apart from his gig at The Nation, he is the author of an insignificant biography of Bruce Springsteen as well as a tirade against the punditocracy, in which he tries out his thesis that the conservative cast of the nation's op-ed pages disproves the notion the mainstream media tilt left. He is, or was, a friend of George Stephanopoulos, whose coattails didn't seem to lift him to more prominence. He's shown up as a talking head occasionally, but his tic of smacking his lips while interrupting seems to have won him few return invitations.

Oh well, at least he's smarter than Michael Moore.

He once contributed a column to Worth magazine, but now rails against business journalists in general. He associates business journalists with the political right, which careful observers know to be preposterous. They gave too much of a pass to Enron, he complains (not without some merit), and they slept as the Internet "bubble" grew huge in front of their faces (again, not entirely wrong). But he himself gets two things whoppingly wrong.

Letter to the Editor

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