The American Spectator

p class=”c1”> strong>A special review of Eric Alterman’s br> What Liberal Media? The Truth About BIAS and the News br> (Basic Books, 322 pages, $25). /strong> /p>

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.