What Liberal Media?
The Truth about Bias and the News
by Eric Alterman
Basic Books
In a limited sense, Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?" is a smashing success. It is everything that contemporary mass-market books about media bias are not: reasoned, methodical, largely sober and, perhaps most importantly in this uncurious age, footnoted. In 13 wide-ranging chapters, Alterman rebuts the claims made by the bevy of likeminded critics who have rallied to the cause of reflexively characterizing the news media as intractably liberal. Into the furthest stretches of what Alterman has named "the punditocracy" we go, wondering, in the end, what the hell is so liberal about the media, anyway?
The central metaphor of the book is that of an athletic contest. Alterman complains that "the right is working the refs," and the resulting game is anything but hospitable to left-of-center points of view. He would know. A columnist for The Nation, and a blogger for MSNBC.com, Alterman spares his readers the pretense of ideological objectivity without sparing them the facts. This may seem commonsensical, even basic, to some readers. In the bleak world of popular media criticism, however, it remains a breakthrough of Gallilean proportions.
Consider the case of Anne Coulter and her book "Slander." Alterman gives us the following highlight reel of her career:
... [She] compared Katie Couric of the Today Show with Eva Braun. (She would later add Joseph Goebbels after Couric challenged her in an interview.) She termed Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, "a dimwit," and a "birdbrain." Sen. Jim Jeffords is a "half-wit." Gloria Steinem is a "termagent" and "deeply ridiculous figure," who "had to sleep" with a rich liberal to fund Ms. magazine.
In "Slander," Coulter lambasts the media for its liberal bias with characteristic invective. And yet, as Alterman notes, her book garnered her enormous exposure, tons of cash and no small amount of credibility. She appeared on "Today," "Crossfire" and "Hardball"; she was profiled in The New York Times, Newsday and The New York Observer; she appeared as an election analyst on "Good Morning America." To insist, even in the face of these facts, that the media fail to air the opinions of conservatives is, to quote Coulter herself, "deeply ridiculous." And yet that is exactly what she, not to mention other theorists of the "So-Called-Liberal-Media" conspiracy, insists.
Television punditry is particularly damaging to the legitimacy of conservative crankiness on media bias. Considering the panoply of conservative voices populating the airwaves, Alterman asks:
Who among liberals can be counted upon to be as ideological, as relentless, as nakedly partisan, as George Will, Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, William Bennett, William Kristol, Fred Barnes, John McLaughlin, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Ben Wattenberg, Oliver North, Katie O'Beirne, Tony Blankley, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, Tony Snow, Laura Ingraham, Jonah Goldberg, William F. Buckley, Jr., Bill O'Reilly, Alan Keyes, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume, CNBC's roundtable of the self-described "wild men" of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and on and on?
A roster of the Workers of the World party, or even the Democratic Leadership Council, it ain't. This comes as little surprise to Alterman, whose analysis of talk radio and the Internet draws basically the same conclusion: Far from being underrepresented in these media, conservatives are among its most visible and successful personalities. In case you had somehow blocked it out, Alterman reminds readers that Rush Limbaugh reaches 15 to 20 million listeners every time he starts shouting into his microphone.
Some pundits have the wherewithal to acknowledge their political allegiances outright; others hide behind the fiction that they aren't being political, they're just creating a "no-spin" zone. Regardless of style, Alterman suggests that being a successful pundit has more to do with television ratings than journalistic accuracy. He rakes through the coals not only conservatives Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity for their frequent on-air fallacies and phony class allegiances, but also the supposedly liberal Chris Matthews, whose contribution to the public discourse includes the following on Hilary Clinton: "Where did she get the idea the public should worship her as almost a goddess?" The word pundit derives from the Sanskrit word "panditah," or "learned man." In our moment, however, it might as well stand in for "self-promoting, pseudo-intellectual thuggery." The distinguishing factor of modern punditry is its insistence on simplicity and controversy over and against nuance and accuracy. "For liberals," Alterman writes, "this is a problem with no easy solution."
But, while "What Liberal Media?" is a clear success in its least interesting form — bashing holes in conservative popular mythology — its thematic digressions are at once more intriguing in their investigation and less satisfying in their conclusions. Alterman devotes significant time to discussing the genealogy of the conservative media movement — its think tanks, in-house publications, power lunches and speaking fees — and in so doing invites the straightforward conclusion that the massive capital invested on behalf of conservative media outlets and their accoutrements is responsible for the punditocracy's conservative tilt. But he also waxes reflective on the state of journalism, the 2000 election, The Wall Street Journal, the activities of conservative mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, and the kid-glove coverage of President George W. Bush, all of which could have, and in some cases does have, entire books dedicated to their exposition. Alterman, though informative, merely scratches the surface in these cases.
All the while, people are tuning in to Fox News and to Lou Dobbs' "Moneyline" and to "The McLaughlin Group." The public is watching. As the book demonstrates, the efficacy of the liberal media myth has nothing to do with the reality of the news media as it's constituted. Rather, it has everything to do with the perceptions of a swath of the electorate for whom the assumption that a liberal media conspiracy — like Richard Nixon's Jewish media conspiracy before it — makes perfect sense (ironically, one of the defining features of the punditocracy is an unrelenting support for Israel over and against the Palestinians). That every voice heard on the radio and seen on the television bemoaning the liberal media is conservative doesn't strike them as the least bit odd, or at least not odd enough to turn off the television and pick up a copy of Dissent.
It's not just audiences that have succumbed. Prominent journalists themselves write as if their liberalism were an unsightly blemish — Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times being a perfect example. The New Republic, on a good day the nation's most sophisticated liberal magazine, spends as much time bashing the Palestinians and academic postmodernists as it does taking on the Bush Administration.
Yet Alterman remains optimistic, trying to make the best of this sorry state of affairs. "The most basic problem faced by American journalists," he writes, "both in war and in peace, is that much of our society remains unaware, and therefore unappreciative, of the value of the profession's contribution to the equality and practice of our democracy." Perhaps. But his book doesn't give liberals cause to be appreciative of contemporary journalism. On the contrary, it demonstrates conclusively how much journalism has become a right-of-center Wizard of Oz. Liberal media bias? If only.
— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)
