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.
First, the problem of moral hazard, a product of regulation,
eludes him. Enron, he believes, along with, say, the reportorial
staff of the Los Angeles Times, gave us the California
energy crisis. His mind, along with, say, the reportorial staff of
the Los Angeles Times, is so uncomplicated that the
connection between California’s merely partial deregulation and a
consequent distortion of incentives can’t be seen. “Deregulation”
did it to us, he and, say, the reportorial staff of the Los
Angeles Times believe.
But Alterman’s syllogism would, one presumes, place the
reportorial staff of the Los Angeles Times within the
dominant media. Therefore, said reportorial staff, were it not
tilting to the left, would regularly and accurately blame a
legislative “deregulatory” half-measure, rather than
“deregulation,” for the state’s energy woes. In fact, the opposite
is true.
Secondly, though he’s right that the Internet “bubble” did
burst, he uses that as a synecdoche for what he believes was the
evaporation of the “new economy.” Too many business journalists did
kneel before this Internet-supported monster, which traded in
information. But, sorry, Eric, the “new economy” — though there
ought to be a better name for it — keeps on chooglin’; the burst
bubble didn’t obliterate it. The hyped companies, those without
real value, were shaken out, leaving the best ones to keep
building. That likely will remain beyond Alterman’s ken even as his
own punditocratic efforts grow even more integrated with the
information economy. It’s no accident he now writes an online “blog” for
MSNBC.com.
Alterman never really worked on a newspaper, if you trust his
dust-jacket bio. It shows. Of course, he lectures reporters on
proper journalistic procedure, even though he commits mistake after
factual mistake. (We’ll pass over the multiple spelling and
grammatical errors; how far Basic Books has fallen!) He seems to
think, for example, that Irving Kristol and William Simon created
the American Enterprise Institute in the 1980s in order to turn the
media conservative. He seems to think, verging on conspiracy
theory, that they succeeded.
He also betrays an ignorance of newspaper organizational
structure, keeping alive the leftist notion that a concentration of
corporate ownership denies diversity of thought and keeps the major
newspapers rightwing. I wonder if he’s set foot in a newsroom. In
most of America’s newsrooms, “diversity” and “civic journalism” —
the idea that reporters and editors set the agenda for community
life — reign supreme. Like college presidents who abdicate to
their faculty senates, publishers have long since abdicated to
their editors, most of whom are drearily left of center.
As I write, Editor & Publisher magazine, the
“bible” of the industry, reports its survey that two-thirds of the
nation’s newspapers oppose President Bush on Iraq. Now, there’s an
inconvenient fact for Alterman’s thesis.
Weirdly, Alterman actually refutes his own thesis. On page 107,
he writes: “From my own perspective as an urban, East Coast liberal
who is surrounded by others who hold views not unlike my own, I am
certainly prepared to believe that members of the elite media
transmit liberal views in the guise of objective reporting on
occasion.” He goes on to explain that these attitudes are shaped,
not by a political agenda, but by the social class in which
journalists find themselves — a class that, you guessed it,
happens to be liberal.
This is a new argument, made again recently by the New York
Times’s newest op-ed writer, Nicholas Kristoff, who (a)
discounted charges of liberal media bias while (b) explaining away
the sneering attitude journalists take toward evangelical
Christians, an attitude he rues, as a trope of the more educated
class of which journalists are a part. In other words, “We’re not
biased … but our biases are shaped by our class.”
Did anyone ever explain to these guys that social determinism
tends to be an idea of the Left?
YOU MAY IGNORE MUCH of this book, much of it a tendentious
rehashing of liberal themes: Clinton was ambushed by the right-wing
conspiracy, which also, working through the Florida legislature and
the Supreme Court, stole the election from the infinitely
honorable, honest and better qualified Al Gore. What’s this got to
do with liberal bias? Well, the “cowed” media, afraid of being
called liberal, just weren’t behaving as the classic investigative
“watchdogs” they were meant to be.
That’s the closest he gets to the gravamen of the conservative
complaint, namely that journalists let their biases slip into
allegedly straight reporting. Mostly he imagines himself nobly
debunking the liberal media charge by inveighing against
conservative columnists and talk-show hosts, who provide welcome
balance to smug straight-newspeople whose idea of acting as
“watchdog” means watchfully finding social issues that government,
by growing, can solve. These folks have long since stopped growling
at government growth and coercion.
Alterman’s leaky little launch took on way too much water in the
first chapter. But don’t miss the last pages, in which he theorizes
— mirroring rightwing pamphleteers of the Birch persuasion — that
the media reflexively follow the dictates of a powerful cabal of
conservative activists and misanthropic millionaires, “the
Conintern.” Like the Birchers whose theories were always
“documented,” Alterman proudly offers lots and lots of meaningless
footnotes, sometimes citing himself.
If, being an astute American, you know the media tilt left, then
maybe, just for the sake of mirth, you should indulge the
through-the-looking glass experience of Alterman’s last pages. But
you should know that, somewhere, a news producer or bureau chief is
thanking Alterman, and all his footnotes, for de-“cowing” him.
Which was Alterman’s purpose.
Alterman actually gives the game away in his acknowledgments. He
credits the idea and even the title of his book to Todd Gitlin, the
Sixties radical who, as president of Students for a Democratic
Society, wanted to overturn the reviled liberal order and supplant
it with far-left ideology. Gitlin nowadays is everywhere cited in
the mainstream media, with nary a reference to his activism, as a
scholarly Sixties authority. No more needs be said about this
book.
