WASHINGTON — So we hear this week that President George W. Bush
is taking delight in the spread of the “alternative press” (read
conservatives on the Internet, in talk radio, in print, and at Fox)
and the gentle detumesence of “mainstream media” (read liberal
media, or more precisely Democratic media). Well, I join him in his
satisfaction.
I have spent much of my life with journalists, beginning in
competitive swimming and moving on to politics and culture.
Usually, even in covering sports, the journalists have been liberal
Democrats. I recall a Sports Illustrated writer who used
to come out to Indiana to cover my world champion teammates on the
Indiana University swimming team. He was a very agreeable fellow,
but two decades later he ended up as campaign press secretary
during Al Gore’s first run for the White House. Well, that is the
way things have been in American journalism. From journalism one
drifts into Democratic politics. From Democratic politics one
drifts into journalism, often TV journalism. Think of Chris
Matthews, Tim Russert, and George Stephanopoulos.
Some of these journalists are very dreary duds. But others are
lively. The best are energetic, curious, often intelligent,
occasionally well-read. Yet I have often sensed something
off-putting about them. It is as though they were members of one of
those weird California cults. They seem friendly enough. On
occasion they are feverishly friendly, but then one senses
something else, a secretiveness, a smugness, and in many instances,
a peculiar conformity. Journalists are forever breaking into dry
discourses on their “journalistic ethics.”
I find that odd. Why are they so sensitive about their ethics?
Is it because their ethics are so elusive? Most of the time when I
find myself in a journalistic controversy I do come away with the
conviction that the ethics of the mainstream journalist — the
liberal Democratic journalist — are, well, rubbery. Consider a
controversy I found myself in last month. I chaired a panel at the
Conservative Political Action Conference, featuring a debate
between former Justice Department official Viet Dinh and former
congressman Bob Barr on government surveillance. It was an
intelligent give-and-take. Conservatives are divided on this issue,
revealing again that there is variety of opinion among
conservatives, a variety of opinion one rarely encounters among
liberals. I judged the audience pretty much equally divided, as did
Barr and Dinh.
A report on the debate by Dana Milbank in the Washington
Post proved to be clearly inaccurate, even mischievously
inaccurate. Consequently, as it was a panel I presided over, I
wrote a clarifying letter to the editor, sending a copy to the
paper’s Ombudsman. Mainstream media have created the quaint
position of the Ombudsman, out of concern for journalistic
“ethics.” My letter has never been printed, and the Ombudsman’s
response was another example of the liberal journalists’
weirdness.
Here is the unpublished letter:
Dana Milbank’s report of the Conservative Political
Action Conference’s debate on civil liberties, moderated by me, is
inaccurate in matters large and small. Large: it is not true that
“the crowd was against” former congressman Bob Barr’s libertarian
criticism of the Bush Administration’s surveillance policies. Both
Bob and I considered the audience pretty evenly divided. There
exists considerable disagreement among conservatives on this issue,
as has been widely reported. Small: I am not “a conservative
publisher” but rather the editor in chief of The American
Spectator, a position I have held for nearly 38 years. As
such, I have been interviewed by Milbank in the past, and my last
name has not one “r” but two. Milbank botched my middle name as
well.
The American Spectator’s publisher is Al Regnery whose
name is easier to spell.
The Ombudsman’s odd response was to e-mail me that she was sending
the letter to her “national editor to see about correcting your
name.” Of course, the burden of my complaint was that Milbank was
playing sophomorically with the facts of the event and misleading
his readers “in matters large and small.” That is what mainstream
media and Ombudsmen in particularly are supposed to be concerned
about. Several days later in the paper’s “Corrections” section here
is what was printed:
The Feb. 11 Washington Sketch misspelled the name of R.
Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the editor in chief of the American
Spectator.
As I say, there is often something smug and secretive about these
journalists. The above “correction” hid the real issue regarding
the Milbank report. Even its identification of me was cryptic,
evading the initial misidentification of me. Such Byzantine
maneuvering goes on all the time in the “mainstream media,” which
is why they have lost the trust of so many Americans. Once a news
organization has lost the public’s trust it has very little to
offer.
