An Interview With Edith Efron
An Interview with Edith Efron Edith Efron is the author of The News Twisters, a study of network news which argues that in the seven weeks prior to the 1968 presidential election, network news...
...If they were really intelligent they would let the airwaves be free and then stand there and grin, because they would have deprived the conservatives and Republicans of a legitimate argument and they would still run the roost...
...That is exactly right...
...This bias they complain about is an intellectual and ideological problem...
...And journalists tend to come from that world...
...Miss Efron: They're rare you see...
...Rich Republican trustees are financing these universities which are, most of the time, persecuting the conservative professors, squeezing them out...
...But, unless they grasped the opportunity - and they show no inclination of doing this - things wouldn't improve...
...So does that mean that because all the land is bought up in Scarsdale that we should rush out and nationalize Scarsdale...
...That increases the likelihood of people of like mind recommending each other...
...There are, and there are conservative professors from coast to coast, but they're hopelessly abandoned...
...The normal and natural fighters in that realm are intellectuals...
...Miss Efron: Yes, and I think that the present situation actually acts as a disguise, because it's very convenient for them to be able to shout that they're victimized, without ever facing the fact that they have fortunes they are not fighting with...
...Why is it that only Ford and Rockefeller are pouring out...
...The Alternative: You used the word "plot...
...The Alternative: In this situation would a few influential national networks still get a high proportion of viewership...
...I'm also talking about the businessmen who never give Bill Buckley any advertising...
...Miss Efron: Yes, that's right...
...The Alternative: How can the networks be opened up to diverse opinions...
...The Alternative: And how would this be done in practice...
...Schlesinger, Mr...
...They've been turned into bigshots - Galbraith is another - they've been erected into tremendous figures of great significance by Democratic politicians...
...But the real problem is not that there are no conservative intellectuals...
...See Miro Todorovich's review elsewhere in this issue...
...The Alternative: You are saying that Republicans and conservatives tend not to be interested in ideas...
...The Alternative: You seem to feel then that the medium is pretty much dominated by liberals and that this distorts the news...
...The Alternative: If government would get out of the business of regulating the medium we could sell the airwaves to the highest bidder and with cable television and all the other technological advancements, we would then have a wider spectrum...
...Her most recent book, How CBS Tried to Kill a Book (Nash, $7.95), details one network's reaction to The News Twisters...
...It's all pay...
...The Alternative: What you're saying, in effect, is that if the liberals were cagey they would come out for selling the airwaves...
...The Alternative: The argument is though, isn't it, that the government has to be involved in broadcasting because the number of frequencies is limited...
...The last four years there could have been a tremendous collection of brains walking in and out of those White House doors and there would have been a whole group of prominent intellectuals of a contrasting persuasion if Mr...
...A third book, a study of network coverage of the 1972 presidential election is in the works...
...William Buckley would be considered partisan and Mr...
...Miss Efron: That's right...
...There is an elitist concept that anyone who is an avowed radical or an avowed conservative is definitionally a partisan human being who cannot be objective...
...It's totally irrational...
...Republicans just don't do that...
...Yes, yes it's a tragedy...
...Miss Efron: There is a tendency, and when members of their own group need help - and there are thousands and thousands and thousands, but they would still be in the minority next to the liberals - they don't support them...
...it's pay poetry, pay novels, pay newspapers, pay movies, pay theaters, pay everything...
...The problem only exists in the one government regulated industry which gives away the ideological and artistic product as a sort of accessory to advertising - as if novels were given away as a side issue with mattresses...
...Why is it that there are many, many rich conservative and right wing foundations, but that tremendous grants to produce intellectual studies that would influence the culture do not come from them...
...Miss Efron: Well, because that is'the state of the intellectual culture, and they would still continue to dominate it, and since the Republicans and conservatives who would be the logical ideological competition for them don't particularly invest in intellectual activities and virtually never support their intellectuals, competition would be hard to come by...
...A tremendous compensation could be made to try to be more fair...
...It says, "To maintain some claim to political power in such times, a dominant party or elite needs to have articulated some vision of the common good - something a party can stand on and stand for beyond its own continuation in office...
...When you get right down to it, in my own experience, the Republicans and conservatives have expressed great joy with my existence and with my book, but it never occurred to the Republican party to buy 50,000 copies...
...It was as if he couldn't grasp that there was a more complex dimension open to him...
...And that is, because the government has been handing out monopolies the whole broadcast industry has not had its First Amendment rights intact since practically the beginning...
...Miss Efron: Then presumably television stations would all be catering to whatever audiences they could get, which is no more and no less than other people do in other media...
...Miss Efron: Theoretically, it would exist, but it could be very restrained...
...Why is it that Human Events and National Review and publications of that type are always broke...
...There are now a limitless number of channels...
...Do you favor selling the airwaves...
...If television news departments are now controlled by an elitist group of liberals who refuse to hire people with opposing viewpoints, how do you make them hire other people...
...They would no longer be able to say that broadcasting was legally and politically and economically rigged against their views...
...It is widely known that Miss Efron feels television news is dominated by liberals...
...For one thing, I might as well have been talking Greek...
...I said, "But Mr...
...It's as if, psychologically, that is not their terrain, that they feel they may not enter and they don't even know why...
...And it is totally decentralized, so you don't have anything but individuals selling to individuals...
...Hunt...
...Miss Efron: Well, definitionally this would knock out monopoly, but they would not lose their dominance of the culture...
...Every other medium of communication in the United States works on a privately owned basis - the product is sold on a free market...
...Miss Efron: Just the way AP and UPI sell enormous amounts of material...
...Miss Efron: Well that argument, in principle, was folly to begin with...
...The Alternative: An editorial in the Wall Street Journal on August 21 suggests this very idea...
...materials influencing the culture artistically, politically and every which way, and the great big conservative and Republican foundations are investing their dough in banks and real estate...
...At any rate, as of the present, cable television renders this argument for government control of the frequencies technologically anachronistic...
...But they will not look at a broke little intellectual and understand that he contains the ammunition they need for a different kind of battle...
...Do you agree...
...Miss Efron: My answer is to go underneath the reason for which they are in this position of untouchability...
...Hunt has limitless fortunes apparently and yet he he puts out something equivalent to a mimeographed sheet...
...When you consider who were Mr...
...Miss Efron: What it would do, simply, is create a free market situation in which ultimately it would reflect the culture such as it is...
...Do you think a plot exists today...
...Miss Efron: The only way, theoretically, is to run networks the way you run TV Guide, which is to say that you have people from all points of the political spectrum doing your coverage and your interpretation...
...The Alternative: So what you are saying then is that if we would open up the airwaves this would give Republicans and conservatives, for example, a better opportunity to get their points across, but you don't think it would have any real effect...
...And, at one point in the conversation he boasted to me that there were 125 newspapers which would print his letters to the editor...
...And better than that we can't ask...
...The Alternative: And you're saying this is the big failure of Republicans and conservatives...
...Eric Sevareid, who is a lifelong liberal, is not...
...And that is the reason you have the total variety of thoughts and art out on the market...
...The Alternative: What's the answer then...
...The culture is dominately liberal, has been so for some forty years and has been moving steadily to the left in the intellectual world for that period of time...
...Com-mager, and they're just two of a band of historians...
...There is some evidence of that, but I'm not prepared to say until I've finished the study I'm doing now...
...It is the government control of broadcasting that causes this...
...When they think of a powerful man, they think of a big industrialist who could manipulate the materials of the earth in a long range and potent way, and that is power - that's one kind...
...I was curious about just this since Mr...
...The Alternative: Why is this...
...I saw a very remarkable example of this when I had dinner with H.L...
...Practically speaking one would have a free press operating within the culture as it is, and at least the Republicans and conservatives would no longer have anyone but themselves to blame if the thing keeled over against them...
...I was wondering why this limitation on the intellectual things that he pushes when he has that kind of money and that was what I questioned him about...
...Miss Efron: It would give them the opportunity...
...Thus Mr...
...This is liberal megalomania...
...There is this weird assumption that only an avowed liberal - if he doesn't wear a button of some kind - is capable of such objectivity...
...How do you think the bias can be removed...
...Land is limited...
...They really have to be neutral because they just won't get bought if they aren't...
...Miss Efron: Right...
...Miss Efron: You can't...
...That this requires intellectual skills is a major reason no such vision is apparent after four years of Republican rule...
...But please notice they are selling to papers that are operating in a free market...
...President Nixon gets in the White House and in four years there has never been a Republican intellectual brain trust...
...Nixon had simply shed his light upon them, but he didn't do it...
...Miss Efron: That's the basic problem or at least to get them to understand that the problem is ideas and to put money be mind it...
...The Alternative: I take it you feel Mr...
...The Alternative: In such a free press situation do you think the liberals would lose their near monopoly of the airwaves...
...The Alternative: You said the underlying problem is that conservatives generally aren't interested in ideas...
...Republicans don't appreciate this and unless they put money behind intellectuals and hire them, and support them and nurture them nothing will change...
...In addition, in the business of writing it's hard to find good writers, it's hard to find good TV people and they rely heavily on personal recommendations...
...The Alternative: In summary you feel the only way to eliminate or offset liberal bias of the media is to first, open the airwaves, and second, to get Republicans and conservatives interested in ideas...
...The Alternative: As I understand it, the overall conclusion of The News Twist-ters was, very briefly, that television news had a liberal bias in 1968...
...They live like poor orphans...
...Hunt, you could buy those papers," and he looked at me as if I had gone mad...
...A great many things are limited...
...An Interview with Edith Efron Edith Efron is the author of The News Twisters, a study of network news which argues that in the seven weeks prior to the 1968 presidential election, network news showed a distinctly liberal bias...
...Nixon isn't unique in this seeming disdain for intellectual battles...
...I think opening the airwaves would make things a little better anyway, but maybe most of all it would take way the defense that Republicans and conservatives have which keeps them from acknowledging their own responsibility for the vacuum...
...Republican or conservative journalists have not immediately been turned into the guys that get the scoops.Whereas the Democrats and the liberals always take care of their own...
...Books are not something that they deal with...
...The Alternative: Do you think that bias still exists...
...Miss Efron: Yes I do...
...In the following interview The Alternative questions her about the underlying reasons for this bias and her suggestions as to how the bias might be eliminated...
...Miss Efron: Yes, that is exactly right...
...In other words, it didn't start out as a plot against those who did not share their views, but historically and professionally it has ended up with virtually all of them coming from one small portion of the spectrum...
...You can't violate the First Amendment...
...The Alternative: And what exactly would this do...
...They're extremely rare and when they are really sophisticated and articulate as Bill Buckley is or Bill Rusher or James Kilpatrick, then they tend to be grabbed up as tokens...
...Miss Efron: It still isn't a plot...
...The Alternative: Why do you think this liberal bias existed in the first place...
...Miss Efron: Well, in a general way, I think one of the major reasons is historical...
...What about people like Bill Buckley...
Vol. 6 • November 1972 • No. 2
