Guilty (3 page)

It wasn't black people's job to tell whites to stop being pussies, it was white people's job to stop being pussies.

The O.J. verdict finally did that. At last, reasonable people began to roll their eyes when white liberals and professional blacks droned on about racism. The shocking images of law students at Howard University cheering a black man who had just gotten away with two heinous murders was the end of the infantilization of blacks in America.

But it was a good run, which is why from college campuses, to the literary world, to public discourse, to politics—everyone wants to be a victim.

LIBERALS LIVE IN A WORLD IN WHICH EVERYONE IS EITHER AN oppressor or a victim. In this rather extreme morality play, they control the casting: They are always the victims, and conservatives are always the oppressors. These dramatic productions are brought to you by network television, the
New York Times,
and NPR, with the Greek chorus backing them up on cable. The plots are so well known that liberals of various stripes have memorized their parts and take the stage eagerly, hoping to deliver a best-supporting actor performance, for which they might win, say, a Pulitzer, a university chair, or a Sunday morning interview with Tom Brokaw.

The rest of us are forced to live in liberals' fantasy lives, inasmuch as liberals command a monopoly on the writing of these morality plays. Naturally, they are irredeemably hostile to outsiders such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, who would audaciously suggest that Joe Wilson has been fatally miscast in the role of Victim. Nobody likes a critic.

The establishment media are the most powerful force in the nation and yet they are constantly claiming to speak up for the little guy and berating those whom they call “the powerful.” In this affectation, they are like the fake blind guy asking for spare change and then beating street urchins when no one is looking.

The media are irreducibly powerful because they produce everything we know about the world outside of our personal experience. And these are people whose morality is so perverse that, as Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center pointed out, “they showed more outrage at John McCain featuring a picture of Paris Hilton in a commercial for two eye blinks than for Edwards catting around on a dying spouse.”

How the media report stories, which stories they report, and which they don't report create the universe of accepted facts. As Newman said of the post office in the sitcom
Seinfeld,
“When you control the mail, you control information.” Even sports columns have a political
agenda, such as Robert Lipsyte's pompous denunciation of Cold War politics in a 1995
New York Times
sports page column. Remarking on Mickey Mantle's liver disease, Lipsyte said:

You could hear a pin drop. When Lipsyte announced he was leaving the sports page to write about politics full-time, his editor stopped him just in the nick of time:
Don't do it, Robert! You'll hurt yourself—-you're not smart enough!

What keeps people reading the
New York Times
—to the extent people still are reading the
Times
—is not the paper's brave editorial stance on Iraq. It is the massive coverage that can only be provided by more than a thousand reporters, editors, photographers, and newsroom staff. A newspaper with the vast resources of the
Times
that had a reputation for editorial evenhandedness would do even better. But the relentless censorship and partisanship of the major media made alternative media sources such as Fox News not only possible, but necessary.

The expansion of the alternative media in the last decade has allowed a breach in the wall of sound of the one-party establishment media, at least for those who take the trouble to seek out commentary to the right of V. I. Lenin. So now the big complaint from the Left is that people can pick their own news sources—also known as “choice.” Liberals fret that people will only be exposed to “Me-zines” and “The Daily Me”—as if the
New York Times
were not exactly that. This represents a crisis: No one can be forced to read the
New York Times
anymore! What will become of us?

Liberals carry on so about Fox News Channel that one almost forgets how much power the establishment media still have. After half a
century of being attacked by every possible news outlet, Republicans have the Stockholm syndrome. They're so tickled to have one fair and balanced cable channel in an ocean of liberal advocacy that it doesn't even cross their minds to be shocked when the Democratic candidates for president refuse to participate in a debate on Fox News—the highest-rated news station on cable TV—on the grounds that the channel is “conservative.” These same Democrats were, however, willing to submit to questions from a talking snowman on the CNN/YouTube debate. If any TV station were treated like this during the mythical “McCarthy era,” I would admit that liberals' claims of blacklisting were not entirely imaginary.

It is impossible to imagine Republicans self-righteously spurning a debate sponsored by CBS News—the station that once employed left-wing conspiracy nut Dan Rather. Indeed, for reasons that remain obscure, Republican candidates for president submitted to partisan harangues from Chris Matthews in a debate on unfair and mentally unbalanced MSNBC, which incidentally has about one-third the viewers of Fox News.

By any objective standard, Fox News is a more respected and respectable news outlet than MSNBC—to say nothing of CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. It has a greater variety of opinion, including liberal hosts Chris Wallace, Shep Smith, Greta Van Susteren, and Geraldo Rivera, and even its one clearly conservative host, Sean Hannity, is balanced by his liberal cohost Alan Colmes. Hannity also happens to preside over the second-most-watched program on all of cable news. Fox News has never been caught promoting a fraud—unlike CBS (Bush National Guard story), ABC (tobacco industry report),
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NBC (exploding GM trucks),
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CNN (Tailwind),
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and MSNBC (Keith Olber-mann).

In 2008, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, said that “starting in Iowa and up to the present—Fox has done the fairest job, and remained the most objective of all the cable networks.”
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Even Hillary Clinton agreed that Fox News had the fairest political coverage, citing an independent study showing that. Noting the “pattern of demeaning comments” made on NBC networks, Hillary
remarked that MSNBC hadn't issued apologies for commentary “that might have merited one.”
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But reality is irrelevant. Fox News does not ferociously promote a left-wing agenda, so liberals do not consider it real news. That Fox News is “partisan” has been agreed upon by the establishment media and they have determined that they determine what reality is. It's as if we're speaking French and they're speaking Urdu. Instead of responding to the smashing success of Fox News by becoming more balanced and thereby winning more viewers, the establishment media have apparently decided to wait Fox out. Roger Ailes can't live forever.

Seized by their Stockholm syndrome, Republicans had to be forced by livid rank and file conservatives to register a mild objection when it was revealed that the moderator of the vice presidential debate, Gwen Ifill—of the totally nonpartisan Public Broadcasting Service—was writing a book titled
The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.
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Only because the author of the Sweetness
&
Light blog happened to be searching Amazon for another Obama book was this startling fact discovered before the debate. The book was scheduled to be released on Inauguration Day, so its prospects obviously depended to a great degree on Obama's being elected. There wouldn't be much of a “breakthrough” if he lost.

In no other circumstance would anyone conceive of allowing a self-interested party to mediate such a contest. It would be as if a Miss America judge had a book coming out titled
The Breakthrough: Beauty Contests in the Age of Miss South Dakota
before the winner had been chosen. Would anyone consider permitting a sports referee to bet on the game or a judge to have a financial interest in a case's outcome? No, of course, not—it's utter madness. But when it comes to the media, even after the explosion of alternative news sources, nonliberal news sources are still the redheaded stepchild.

Accustomed to being abused by the media, Americans meekly submit to boring debates focusing on the political fetishes of people living in Manhattan and Los Angeles. The difference between the forum moderated by Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church and the
debates moderated by the dinosaur media was like the difference between great literature and
Screw
magazine.

Warren asked the candidates about abortion, their moral failings, the wisest people in their lives, taxes (“Define ‘rich' ”), what's worth dying for, war, AIDS, religious persecution, and human trafficking.

The mainstream media moderators asked questions like “Who would you name as your Treasury secretary?” It was as if all the big questions had been resolved by PBS and the
New York Times,
and now we just needed to know about staffing decisions. How about illegal immigration? Guns? Taxes? None of that interested liberals. Gwen Ifill asked the vice presidential candidates about global warming. A series of
Washington Post
polls from 2007 to 2008 found that global warming was the most important issue for 0 percent of voters.
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No matter. Liberals with beachfront haciendas are scared to death of global warming's effect on beach erosion, so that's what the candidates were asked.

This is still how we choose the leader of the free world!

But liberals blandly deny that there is a liberal establishment. After decades of angrily denouncing the reams and reams of evidence that the media were massively left-wing, one day, liberals began admitting that the media had once been liberal—but those days were long past. On a typical night of CNN coverage during the 2008 Republican National Convention, CNN had conservative commentators Alex Castellanos, Tara Wall, Leslie Sanchez, and Bill Bennett. Balancing out the four conservatives were eight liberals—Donna Brazile, Roland Martin, Paul Begala, James Carville, Gloria Borger, Dana Bash, David Gergen, and Jeffrey Toobin.

It's as if Fox News never happened.

On evenly balanced CNN that night, the insipid David Gergen claimed to be baffled by Mitt Romney's reference to a “liberal establishment” in his convention speech.

Obviously, it doesn't take much to be a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where the students are willing to spend $50,000 to have their names associated with the most lowbrow of the Harvard degrees.

If there used to be a liberal establishment, how have things changed? There's Fox News, talk radio, and the Internet. Meanwhile, liberals plotting to undermine Fox News are itching to bring back the “Fairness Doctrine” to destroy talk radio and invoke campaign finance laws to restrict speech on the Internet.

Consider that the first small breach in the liberal media behemoth came about only because Ronald Reagan's Federal Communications Commission repealed the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. The Rush Lim-baugh show premiered on August 1, 1988. Illustrating the irony of its name, the “Fairness Doctrine” does not apply to TV stations, newspapers, magazines, or Hollywood movies. Only on the radio is the government required to enforce “fairness.”

By mandating that any political views disseminated over the radio be counterbalanced by the opposing view, the “Fairness Doctrine” not only requires radio stations to give boring crackpots airtime, it also creates a conceptual and administrative nightmare. What is fair? There are conservative and liberal views—but there are also libertarian, Green party, Federalist, and Marxist views. (Though the liberals will tend to have the Marxist arguments covered.) The problem isn't just the paperwork stations would have to fill out. It's also that radio stations would have to start balancing three hours of Rush Limbaugh (20 million listeners) with three hours of Randi Rhodes (6 listeners) every day. Reim-plementation of the “Fairness Doctrine” spells the end of talk radio.

So naturally Democrats are itching to bring it back! Democrats have already passed two bills reinstating the “Fairness Doctrine” since
its merciful repeal—both vetoed, by Republican presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
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Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senators Jeff Bingaman, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, John Kerry, and Chuck Schumer—all Democrats—have said they want to reinstate the “Fairness Doctrine.”

A Clinton-appointed judge has found that speech on the Internet is also subject to federal control. In 2004, U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to consider extending the McCain-Feingold speech restrictions to the Internet, saying that exempting the Internet has allowed the “rampant circumvention of the campaign finance laws.”
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Evidently, excluding Hollywood movies and TV shows, magazines, newspapers, and the broadcast and cable networks from federal speech restrictions poses no such threat to the campaign finance laws.