Media Bashing, Liberal-Style

...And the lead weights pulling us ever downward are known to all: "Violence-soaked movies, sex-saturated sitcoms, the more virulent strains of rap music, [and] trash talk...

...News & World Report planned to accept a ludicrously large speaking fee from the criminals at Philip Morris...

...Trash talk" is the subject of his book-that, and the destructive effects of too much talk on the mainstream press...

...There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such stories, and the horror they evoke from Fallows and Kurtz seems genuine enough...

...on behalf of the process of self-government...

...They've held citizen "summits" and convened mock legislatures for their readers...

...The revolution is once again eating its children...

...Fallows pretends that the techniques of public journalism are resisted by the "press establishment...

...The arrogance implicit here is far closer to the real source of the public disenchantment that troubles our media critics...

...Kurtz is a superior newspaper reporter, a Hoover vacuum for evocative detail and revealing quotes...

...The method has yielded an Alexandrian Library of data, as the vast catalogues of the Media Research Center and Accuracy in Media will testify...

...In the White House press room under JFK or FDR...

...The more sophisticated mainstream media critics acknowledge that most reporters are political and cultural liberals...

...This view is part of a larger self-image with which journalism flatters itself : the press-as-clerisy, a sanctified class that raises its gaze to the greater good while everyone else pursues meaner interests...

...Perhaps in the days when Edward R. Murrow was interviewing Jayne Mansfield, and Walter Cronkite was cohosting a kiddie show with a make-believe cow...

...Reporters should not do things mainly for money...

...Media critics are concerned, deeply concerned, and none more so than Howard Kurtz, of the Washington Post...

...How then to regain the public's affection...

...The cure is simply another form of the disease, as reformers reform their earlier reforms...

...In the yellow journalism of the Hearst papers...

...It goes beyond the whipsaw of daily news reporting to place events in context...

...Some of these bits are delicious indeed: Oprah Winfrey, we learn, once ate a 12-pack of hotdog buns soaked in Log Cabin syrup...

...Downie's view is unambiguous: "These are not new ways of reporting...

...America," he writes, "has become a talk-show nation, a boob-tube civilization, a run-at-the-mouth culture in which anyone can say anything at any time as long as they pull some ratings...

...This is a dodge, as he inadvertently concedes: "Although [Washington Post editor] Leonard Downie objects vehemently to public journalism in theory, he has said that he respects most of the actual journalistic projects that have been done in its name...

...The sanctimony can pop out anywhere, anytime, from anyone...

...For Kurtz and his colleagues, the media's problems are far more complex...

...He has devoted an entire book to some of these changes, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time (Times Books, 384 pages, $25...

...It is saturated in conscience...

...and the gatekeepers of yesteryear have been left, so to speak, back at the gate...

...But as an analyst of what the press does and why, he is no help at all...

...And Steve Roberts weighs in on the talk shows: "I've been asked to do McLaughlin, and I won't do it...

...It's worth noting that public journalism was conceived shortly after the debacle of 1988, when, as most reporters know, the Republicans won a third straight presidency by illegitimate means: first the Reagan hypnosis, then the visage of Willie Horton...

...Fallows hints at it himself, taking gentle swipes at such princes of the press as Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings for being out of touch with the plebes...

...Ben Bradlee failed on an early tryout for This Week with David Brinkley because he's "not a knee-jerk liberal...

...Yet it's difficult to grasp the essence of their complaint...

...Silly as it is, the highmindedness has a serious object: Media critics want to root out the source of the public's alienation with the press...

...As a consequence they have undertaken to raise the consciousness of their customers...

...Under sway of public journalism, newspapers have undertaken some remarkable experiments...

...Dooley lamented when the Hungarians moved into the old neighborhood, and media critics share his Irish gloom...

...Any news story that survives more than 36 hours will inevitably inspire another story about how the media are covering the story...

...The mainstream critics believe the press should remain always beyond the vulgar tug of commerce...

...Public journalism is "cooperative, collaborative...

...For years conservatives scoured the morning papers and studied the evening news, on slomo video playback if necessary, for evidence of liberal bias...

...He quotes ABC's Jim Wooten: "Journalism, or reporting, whatever you want to call it, is diminished by the quest for money...

...Journalism," says Fallows, "could not survive if 'public life is not going well.'" Reporters must therefore ensure that public life is going well...

...That criticism was brought into existence in reaction to a crisis: Newspaper readership is declining, the quality of TV news is declining, the length of network soundbites is declining, standards of analysis are declining...

...Breaking the News closes with a call for "public journalism," a nonce enthusiasm of many media critics...

...Tom Brokaw, who is paid $2 million a year to read other people's words from a teleprompter, refuses those big speaking fees: "I call it white-collar crime...

...Mainstream critics have determined, as we've seen, that liberal bias isn't a problem...

...It is probably coincidence that in Hot Air the subtle thinkers, the guys too good for TV, happen to be liberals, or rather liberals who decline to be identified as such...

...Media reporters have been hired, foundations raised up, countless panels convened with such titles as "Are Ratings Driving the News...

...This is also why Kurtz can let drop a truly "horrendous" datum-that in network news coverage before the 1994 election, 100 percent of the comments about Newt Gingrich were negative-and then return without further comment to pummeling Rush Limbaugh for complaining about media bias...

...Cleric-critics like Fallows and Kurtz cast their eye over the new regime of radio gasbags, TV shoutathons, and Internet yahoos, and like a Park Avenue matron finding a gang of stevedores in the front parlor, they ask: "Who are all these people...

...Under either "public" or "traditional" journalism, the press's view of itself as a clerisy, as an agent of uplift, remains unchanged...

...For 20 years the baby-boomer press has discharged a kind of free-floating moralism into public life, most of it poorly thought out, and now it has entangled the boomer press itself...

...Mainstream media critics inevitably mutate into moralists-it's one of the hazards of the job-but whether as critic or moralist, Kurtz fails in his first task, which is to make distinctions...

...He can elide from the relatively sober Limbaugh to the querulous quintet on McLaughlin to the mildly kooky G. Gordon Liddy to the wacko "Mark from Michigan," in hopes of rendering them collectively as a single perilous phenomenon of Talk...

...Decline, decline, decline...

...There's a kind of poignancy to the worry, something touching in the cluelessness...

...His book is what reporters call a "notebook dump," a reprocessing of his old stories padded out with the bits that got cut the first time around...

...Now that's news: Steve Roberts turned down a chance to be on TV...

...This gives you an idea of the tone of Kurtz's book, if not of most media criticism-although from his perch at the Post Kurtz has been influential in the field...

...Yet with the exfoliation of "non-traditional" sources of information, the pose grows ever harder to hold...

...that it has been debased, not by bias or ideological conformity, but by the allurements of the world...

...Public journalism is growth therapy: not only for Democracy but for reporters too...

...There's a strong strain of nostalgia in mainstream press criticism...

...After all, much of what Fallows derides in political coverage-its fascination with "inside baseball," for example-was itself a reform of an earlier style of reporting, in which journalists merely told readers what politicians were saying...

...Conservatives should go ahead and admit that the right dominates the "talk culture," from Limbaugh to the Capital Gang...

...The mainstream press-known as the "liberal media" to conservative critics- has responded by inventing a media criticism all its own...

...Kinsley, for his part, "could not function on television as a Clinton 'surrogate'," which will come as a surprise to most Crossfire viewers, as well as to George Stephanopoulos, who offered Kinsley a job as a Clinton speechwriter...

...Paid speaking engagements, says Fallows, "reinforce the idea that journalists are really just performers, who put on a show for a price...

...and "The Incredible Shrinking Soundbite...

...It's difficult to know when or where this ancien r?gime of uncorrupted journalism actually existed...

...Kurtz is a regular panelist...

...At the richer papers nowadays, ombudsmen stalk the newsroom...

...The more time you spend with lobbyists and corporate officials," Kurtz writes, "the more you come to identify with their world view...

...And to underscore the peril it poses to the mainstream press, he must postulate like all mythologists an Eden of long ago, a Golden Age when Americans got their news straight...

...And he knows why conservatives are so successful on radio and TV: Liberalism is just too complex for the soundbite-crazed electronic media...

...In their vanity, many members of the press blamed themselves for George Bush's ascension-and for the soundbite ethic, the negative advertising, the superficial reporting that allowed such supposed cynicism to succeed...

...There's a certain rough justice in all this indignation, as incoherent or implausible as it may be...

...And the big one: Is money-particularly lush speaking fees-corrupting journalism...

...They cite the work of James Warren, sometime media critic for the Chicago Tribune, who has broken several stories that turn the stomach of every media critic...

...But they should probably look elsewhere...

...A syllogism: Reporters make good money, people who make good money are conservative, ergo et QED...

...In the fall of 1994, for example, NBC's Tim Russert received $20,000 to interview Robert Rubin and Bob Dole in an appearance before the American Bankers Association...

...Conservatives like Pat Buchanan and George Will were comfortable with lack of nuance...

...But for Fallows, "price" is the problem...

...There are heroes among them-Koppel, of course, and King and Kinsley, with reservations-but the rest represent for Kurtz an unrelieved tableau of vulgarity...

...At the New Orleans Times Picayune, "black and white reporters . . . tried for a while to exchange lives with each other, putting themselves as much as possible into the other's racial position and seeing their community through the other's eyes...

...The date of the Fall can be traced with some precision, and it seems roughly to correspond to the rise of right-wingers on the chat shows...

...the fallen state of American journalism is simply assumed...

...But the unhappy chumps hired to shout them down, like Kinsley, Tom Braden, and Sam Donaldson, found it difficult...

...On economic issues . . . elite reporters' views have become far more conservative over the last generation, as their incomes have gone up...

...The august David Broder of the Washington Post is one of its patron saints...

...The once-solid monopoly on national discourse held by the three networks and a handful of elite papers has broken down...

...The world of media has been transformed over the past generation, with the arrival of cable, CNN, talk radio, desktop publishing, C-SPAN, the Internet- any critic can recite the list in his sleep...

...Suddenly, he writes, "viewers and listeners now [have] to be on guard, to decipher and decode the mixed messages from this rapidly changing media culture...

...Similarly, the critics report, Cokie Roberts and her husband Steven V. of U.S...

...but they add hastily that through heroic discipline these same reporters manage to keep it to themselves...

...Fallows, too, wants to follow the money-indeed, both he and Kurtz seem to be using the same money-chasing clips...

...Wooten makes several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year...

...Under that wide umbrella he crowds in Rush Limbaugh, Ted Koppel, conspiracy cranks on the Internet, Larry King, the McLaughlin Group and the Capital Gang, Geraldo Rivera and the omnivorous Oprah, Don Imus and Roger Ailes and Michael Kinsley...

...Having thus dispatched the crux of the conservative critique, most mainstream press critics turn their scrutiny to the winds that whip the surface of their trade...

...Are soundbites corrupting democracy...

...While taking their cue from the right, the mainstream media have managed to leap-frog conservative media criticism altogether, along with its obsession with liberal bias...

...And he's right...

...In the post-Watergate Washington Post...

...Subtle arguments," he writes, referring in this instance to the liberal position on affirmative action, "were lost amid the shouting at CNN...

...technology has exploded the conceit...

...For all its aimless moralizing, its chin-wagging and brow-knitting, mainstream media criticism may be nothing more than the death rattle of an old order passing away...

...Not many people who dislike the press worry that liberal reporters like Cokie Roberts are being bought by the tobacco companies...

...Does the accelerated news cycle hurt long-range government planning...

...That reportage came to be considered the work of a public-relations patsy-it would be far better to give readers "context," background, the inside scoop...

...Change and decay is all around I see," Mr...

...Kurtz doesn't try to tell us...

...For one thing," James Fallows writes in his new book, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (Pantheon, 296 pages, $23), "the supposed 'liberalism' of the elite press is more limited than many people believe...

...And surely no one is disgusted to learn that Tim Russert, or any other journalist who appears on TV, does his work "for a price...

...Ours, Kurtz writes, is "a culture sinking into the gutter...

...Reform follows reform, and still the public turns off Dan Rather and flips on Rush Limbaugh...

...In the end, public journalism will prove to be equally unsatisfying...

...They've reported on "solutions" as well as problems and asked politicians the questions their readers wanted to ask...

...The most notable exception, on CNN, is Reliable Sources, where a panel of "mainstream" reporters lament the decline of journalism, week after week...

...Hot Air is interesting primarily as an illustration-a textbook, really-of contemporary media criticism...

...In 1990 he wrote: "It is time for us in the world's freest press to become activists...