The Bias Bully
Grubbs, K. E. Jr.
S o 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...
...I was the influential editorialist from Southern California's most notoriously conservative county...
...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...
...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...
...Like the Birchers whose theories were always "documented," Alterman proudly offers lots and lots of meaningless footnotes, sometimes citing himself...
...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...
...Enron, he believes, along with, say, the reportorial staff of the Los Angeles Times, gave us the California energy crisis...
...In fact, the opposite is true...
...Did anyone ever explain to these guys that social determinism tends to be an idea of the Left...
...If I expressed opposition to a Republican president—a fortnight before the GOP national convention—then the president was in trouble, as indeed he was...
...You may ignore much of this book and its 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...
...He needed California, which meant he depended on the electoral heft of Orange County...
...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...
...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...
...We'll pass over the multiple spelling and grammatical errors...
...He is, or was, a friend of George Stephanopoulos, whose coattails didn't seem to lift him to more prominence...
...the burst bubble didn't obliterate it...
...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...
...What's this got to do with liberal bias...
...No more needs be said about this book...
...Weirdly, Alterman actually refutes his own thesis...
...First, the problem of moral hazard, a product of regulation, eludes him...
...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...
...My fifteen minutes were up on Election Day...
...That likely will remain beyond Alterman's ken even as his own punditocratic efforts grow even more integrated with the information economy...
...On page two Alterman writes that smart conservatives don't really "believe their own grumbles...
...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...
...Oh well, at least he's smarter than Michael Moore...
...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...
...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...
...The story line was not hard to discern...
...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...
...But you should know that, somewhere, a news producer or bureau chief is thanking Alterman, and all his footnotes, for de-"cowing" him...
...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...
...But he himself gets two things whoppingly wrong...
...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...
...Too many business journalists did kneel before this Internet-supported monster, which traded in information...
...He's not going to start complaining now that he's got memoirs to sell and speaking fees to collect...
...To put it bluntly, the ever-avuncular Baker, during his heyday, was the most famous press-stroker in Washington...
...Alterman never really worked on a newspaper, if you trust his dust-jacket bio...
...The media pumped him...
...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...
...Well, the "cowed" media, afraid of being called liberal, just weren't behaving as the classic investigative "watchdogs" they were meant to be...
...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...
...Sigh...
...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...
...Indeed, it's not only conservatives who find this whipping boy to be an irresistible target...
...They've enjoyedsuccess as jujitsu masters: by using the dominant media culture's left-of-center weight against itself...
...He seems to think, for example, that Irving Kristol and William Simon created the American Enterprise Institute in the1980s in order to turn the media conservative...
...But Alterman's syllogism would, one presumes, place the Los Angeles Times staff within the dominant media...
...In other words, "We're not biased...
...But don't miss the last pages, in which he theorizes—mirroring right-wing pamphleteers of the Birch persuasion—that the media reflexively follow the dictates of a powerful cabal of conservative activists and misanthropic millionaires, "the Conintern...
...The hyped companies, those without real value, were shaken out, leaving the best ones to keep building...
...Of course he lectures reporters on proper journalistic procedure, even though he commits mistake after factual mistake...
...What's wrong with that statement...
...He cites James Baker, who avowed that he couldn't find reason to complain about the media...
...Now there's an inconvenient fact for Alterman's thesis...
...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...
...As for Buchanan—please...
...I wonder if he's set foot in a newsroom...
...That's on page one...
...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...
...Alterman actually gives the game away in his acknowledgments...
...He seems to think, verging on conspiracy theory, that they succeeded...
...It's no accident he now writes an online "blog" for MSNBC.com...
...but our biases are shaped by our class...
...Which was Alterman's purpose...
...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 right-wing...
...And Pat Buchanan, who "found that he could not identify any allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential candidacies...
...For starters, it's sloppy, nonfactual history...
...In most of America's newsrooms, "diversity" and "civic journalism"—the idea that reporters and editors set the agenda for community life—reign supreme...
...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...
...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-news people, whose idea of acting as "watchdog" means watchfully finding social issues that government, by growing, can solve...
...Gitlin nowadays is everywhere cited in the mainstream media as a scholarly sixties authority, with nary a reference to his activism...
...Just who is Eric Alterman, anyway...
...Of course not, but note how the premise of this notion accepts a dominantly liberal media...
...The man who's spent the last decade trying to redefine conservatism as populist isolationism was running against the first President Bush...
...It shows...
...But, sorry, Eric, the "new economy"—though there ought to be a better name for it—keeps on chooglin...
...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...
...Deregulation" did it, he and, say, the reportorial staff of the Los Angeles Times believe...
...how far Basic Books has fallen...
...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...
...Indeed, as I write, Editor & Publisher magazine, the "bible" of the industry, reports in its survey that two-thirds of the nation's newspapers oppose President Bush on Iraq...
...If Alterman doesn't understand the dynamic, I do...
...That's the closest he gets to the gravamen of the conservative complaint, namely that journalists let their biases slip into allegedly straight reporting...
...This is a new argument, made again recently by the New York Times's newest op-ed writer, Nicholas Kristof, 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...
...Therefore, said 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...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
