Are you running for something?” Richard Nixon asked Dan Rather
at a March 1974 press conference.
“No, sir, Mr. President,” the CBS newsman replied. “Are
you?”
Five months later, Nixon left the White House in disgrace. Three
decades after that, Rather left the network in disgrace. He had
become the Richard Nixon of news.
Like the post-presidential Nixon, Rather has been waging a
campaign to rehabilitate himself—although unlike Nixon, who
expressed regret for the scandal that sank his career, Rather has
not acknowledged doing wrong.
This summer Rather, styling himself an elder statesman of
journalism, made a proposal aimed at saving the news business. In a
July Aspen Institute speech and an August Washington Post
op-ed, Rather endorsed a long-standing leftist critique of the
media: that they are controlled by corporations and therefore in
the pocket of the government.
As he wrote in the Post:
The big conglomerates that own most of America’s news media may
have, at any given moment, multiple regulatory, procurement and
legislative matters before various arms of the federal government;
their interests, therefore, can often run contrary to the interests
of the citizens whom journalism, at its best, is meant to serve.
There is little incentive to report without fear or favoritism on
the same government one is trying to lobby. Increasingly, the news
we get—and, significantly, the news we don’t get—reflects this
conflict of interests.
His remedy, believe it or not, is to call on the government for
help:
I want the president to convene a nonpartisan, blue-ribbon
commission to assess the state of the news as an institution and an
industry and to make recommendations for improving and stabilizing
both.
Why bring the president into it? Because this is the only way I
could think of to generate the sort of attention this subject
deserves.…
This is a crisis that, with no exaggeration, threatens our
democratic republic at its core. But you won’t hear about it on
your evening news, unless the message can be delivered in a way
that corporate media have little choice but to report—such as, say,
the findings of a presidential commission.
Imagine the ridicule with which Rather would have greeted a
proposal for a presidential commission on news in 1974. Of course,
that was the heyday of adversarial journalism, when reporters were
instrumental in bringing down a president. Perhaps the ensuing
decades made the media more compliant.
Yet surely Rather would not have approved of such a proposal,
much less put it forward himself, as recently as one year ago—that
is, during the presidency of George W. Bush. Lest we forget,
Rather’s down-fall was occasioned by a hit piece on Bush, then
seeking reelection, that turned out to be based on fraudulent
documents. The problem was neither fear nor favor, just appallingly
shoddy work.
The truth is that the media’s attitude toward government tends
to vary based on party and ideology. It is far more adversarial
when Republicans are in power. If journalists now show favoritism
toward the government, it is mostly because Barack Obama, probably
the most liberal president in history, now runs it.
Far from speaking truth to power, journalists increasingly
regard those in power as authoritative on questions of truth. Last
month in this column, I described how the Associated Press, in its
“fact check” articles, has repeatedly presented Obama campaign
promises as “facts” refuting putative Republican “false-hoods.”
In an August 12 dispatch on a presidential appearance in New
Hampshire, the wire service reported that “Obama assailed ‘wild
misrepresentations’ of his health care plan…, taking on the role of
fact-checker-in-chief for his top domestic priority.” The AP thus
erased the distinction between journalism and politics, or between
truth and power.
A day earlier, the Washington bureau of McClatchy Newspapers
published an article that began:
Two independent organizations that are widely respected for
objective fact-checking on topics of political controversy are
FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center
at
the University of Pennsylvania, and Politifact, a Pulitzer-prize
winning project of the St. Petersburg Times.
Their research into critiques of the health care legislation
pending before Congress was cited Tuesday in a memo from staff to
two Democrats who are helping to shape the legislation—Reps. George
Miller of California, chairman of the House Education and Labor
Committee, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a member of the House
Ways and Means Committee. Both panels approved similar versions of
the legislation.
The House Democrats’ memo, with summaries of fact-checking
research and links to the fact-checkers’ Web sites, follows.
The rest of the story was simply a reprint of the Miller-Van
Hollen press release. McClatchy had been well regarded by Bush
administration foes for its muckraking foreign-policy
investigations. Now it is reduced to letting congressmen from the
party in power literally write the news.
David Stout of the New York Times went so far as to
“fact-check” a question at a town meeting:
“Why does the government want to rush into this bill when many
don’t want it?” Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, was asked
at a “town meeting” in Hagerstown. “Why are you rushing this?”
Calmly, the senator replied in a snippet shown on CNN, “We’ve
got to take as much time as we need to get it right.” And he added,
“The status quo is unacceptable.”
The senator was too polite (or intent on survival) to correct
his questioner by pointing out that there is not one bill yet, but
rather several proposals working their way through five committees
in both houses of Congress, and that to talk of “the government” as
a single entity makes no sense, at least in this context, because
of the divisions between Republicans and Democrats, House and
Senate, Capitol Hill and the White House.
Stout did offer this concession: “As for any implication that
there is a ‘rush’ to enact health care legislation, President Obama
may have been responsible for that, at least in part, by calling
for final action before the House and Senate adjourned for August.”
You don’t say.
One of the bitterest arguments in the summer health care debate
arose when Sarah Palin, in an essay on her Facebook page, raised
the specter of “death panels” denying treatment to sick or disabled
patients. Her language was hyperbolic, but it underscored
legitimate concerns about rationing of care and financial
incentives for doctors to provide end-of-life counseling aimed at
encouraging patients to decline treatment.
An item on the Los Angeles Times website provided
perhaps the best encapsulation of the media’s pro-Obama
approach:
The Palin claim about “death panels” was so widely discredited
that the White House has begun openly quoting it in an effort to
show that opponents of the healthcare overhaul are misinformed.
The fearless, independent journalists of the Los Angeles
Times justify their assertion that the Palin claim was “widely
discredited” with an appeal to authority—the authority of the White
House, which is to say, the other side in the debate.
This is the flip side of liberal media bias. Along with unfair
coverage of Republican administrations, it leads to cheerleading
coverage of Democratic ones. If Dan Rather gets his presidential
commission, it may be the death panel for independent
journalism.
