Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (11 page)

Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He must be made to live in a certain psychological climate.

jacques ellul,
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

G
enerally, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about the political views of an entire industry—but it’s surprisingly easy in the case of the media.

In the 1992 presidential election, a mere 43 percent of Americans voted for Bill Clinton. That same year, 89 percent of Washington bureau chiefs and reporters voted for Clinton. Only 7 percent voted for George Bush.
¹
(It should be noted that, despite their adoration, even Bill Clinton has referred to the media as “the knee-jerk liberal press.”
²
) Indeed, the media elites covering national politics would be indistinguishable from the Democratic Party except the Democratic Party isn’t liberal enough. A higher percentage of the Washington press corps voted for Clinton in 1992 than did this demographic category: “Registered Democrats.”

CNN’s Peter Arnett said of the survey: “Howard Fineman [of
Newsweek]
probably voted for Clinton. I voted for Clinton, but, you know, when it gets to the vote, you do it, and then you go on with your journalism.

I don’t think the two are really related.” Clinton’s press secretary Michael McCurry feigned shock, saying, “If these guys actually voted for Clinton, why don’t they actually be nicer to him in print?”
³

One of the rare voices of sanity was Wolf Blitzer, who said that if the survey was accurate, “It would suggest that there is a problem.”
⁴

The wildly disproportionate percentage of liberals in the media is not an insignificant point. The media determine how the news will be served up, how the players are characterized, what news to report, and what news not to report. The same clichés, biases, and outright lies are constantly reinforced through the media sound chamber.

One of the blabocracy’s favorite lies is that the media is not liberal. They
love
this one, hauling it out at the slightest provocation, polishing absurd “studies” proving the media is—if anything—conservative, and running stories on “The Myth of the Liberal Media”
⁵
and “the so-called liberal press.”
⁶

A “study” analyzing the
New York Times’s
coverage of the 2000 presidential race conclusively proved that “this ‘liberal bastion’ published 50 percent more anti-Gore articles than anti-Bush, and nearly twice as many pro-Bush articles as pro-Gore.”
⁷
Claims of “conservative bias” in the media at large are amusing oddities. But a claim that the
New York Times
has a conservative bias can be explained only by the sheer joy liberals take in telling lies. This is how liberals flaunt their massive control over news in America. The fact that everyone knows they are lying is part of the fun. They take insolent pleasure in saying absurd things, like college radicals giving revolutionary speeches at their parents’ dinner table:
We will raid their wine cellars and have their women!

The
Times
hasn’t endorsed a Republican for president for half a century. Though the
Times
generally issues endorsements as if it is the Oracle of Delphi, in 1972 the
Times
endorsed George McGovern early and enthusiastically, and he carried one state. When vast majorities of Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the
New York Times
was endorsing Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. Even the last winning Democrat the paper endorsed—Bill Clinton—never got as much as half the country to vote for him. (Indeed, through its tried and true method of mechanically endorsing every Democrat, the
Times
hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate who got as much as 50 percent of the vote for over a quarter of a century.)

So, maybe the
Times
is “pro-Republican” compared to the
Berkeley Student Union.
But there is no possible calculus under which the
Times
could be called pro-Republican compared to “Americans”—arguably a more relevant control group.

It ought to tell you something that the “conservative bias” claim is too preposterous even for the
New York Times
to level. The
Times
regularly interprets standard Republican positions as fanatical, religiously based racist hate crimes. But even it can’t screw up the nerve to say the media have a conservative bias. Instead, self-respecting journalists, like those at the
Times,
create a smokescreen for the liberal monolith by viciously attacking any mention of a “liberal media.” The very idea is treated as a wacky theory hatched by troglodyte right-wingers. With some leftists babbling about “conservative bias,” the position of the reasonable middle is simply to deny that there is any slant whatsoever.

Peter Jennings declared: “CNN is mainstream media,... ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it’s just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.”
⁸

Time
magazine’s Jack White denounced the suggestion of liberal bias in the media as “a lot of hokum.” Indeed, if anything, the press is right-wing: “There is no liberal bias in the press on the whole. In fact, if there is a bias, it’s on the other side. It’s hard to find a person really, truly, of the liberal persuasion who is making any important decisions in any important media institutions in this country now. I’ve looked for them, I consider myself one, I have very few birds of a like feather around.”
⁹

It is a peevish liberal trope to claim, as liberal pundit Lawrence O’Donnell, former aide to Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, does, to get “mail and viewer reaction that says I’m just one of those awful Republicans, and then I get mail that says I’m just one of those awful Democrats.”
¹⁰
I’d like to see one of those letters accusing O’Donnell of being a Republican. I’d file them away with the ones telling Larry Flynt he’s not filthy enough.

Some people say the media is liberal, some say it’s conservative. In the end, who’s to say? Some people accuse Dan Rather of being too conservative, some say he’s too liberal. As Rather describes his role as a take-no-prisoners reporter: “I try to blow out lights on both sides of the street.”
¹¹

NBC News correspondent Joe Johns argued that “it’s very hard to draw a very clear picture about what the media are. For every liberal-leaning newspaper, there’s the
Washington Times.”
¹²
And for every person who is not struck by lightning, there’s one who is. Liberal fairness is: They get all major means of news dissemination in America, and conservatives get the
Washington Times,
the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal,
and now Fox News Channel.

In 1996, a longtime veteran of CBS News, Bernard Goldberg, wrote an article for the
Wall Street Journal
asserting that “the networks and other media elites have a liberal bias.”
¹³
In response to Goldberg’s statement of the biindingly obvious, Bob Schieffer, a CBS colleague, responded: “People are just stunned. It’s such a wacky charge ... I don’t know what Bernie was driving at. It just sounds bizarre.”
¹⁴
Dan Rather criticized Goldberg for writing his column for a “conservative” newspaper like the
Wall Street Journal.
Rather wrote this in a column published in the
New York Times
—which he hailed as an example of a “middle of the road” newspaper.
¹⁵
Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief of Time-Warner magazines, responded to Goldberg’s bemused citation of Dan Rather referring to the
New York Times
as “middle of the road” by earnestly repeating that “The
New York Times
is middle of the road.” And not only that, but “to call the
New York Times
left-wing is absurd,” Pearlstine said.
¹⁶

Evidently, to call any publication left-wing is absurd. Not one of them is—not one—not even the newspapers like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
that endorsed Walter Mondale for president the year voters in forty-nine states chose Ronald Reagan. As Pearlstine explained: “There is no active, aggressive, important publication of the left in America.”
¹⁷
Either he means left-wing compared to
Pravda
or he was accusing the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
Detroit Free Press,
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
(among many, many others) of being slothful, passive, and unimportant publications.

When Goldberg expanded upon his thesis in his number one best-selling book,
Bias,
Tom Shales, the
Washington Post
TV reporter, accused Goldberg of “haul[ing] out the old canard about the media being ‘liberal.’ “ In addition, Shales made the point that the Emmy Award-winning Goldberg was a “full-time addlepated windbag,” “a no-talent hack,” “laughably inept,” “not a bright shining star,” “disheveled and bleary-eyed on the air,” and “a flop as a network correspondent.” If any of that were true, then the real scandal is that CBS News kept the inept windbag on air for thirty years. Shales also noted that Goldberg was “a lousy writer.” Good writing is this, also from Shales’s piece: “And we all know how unbiased those
[Wall Street] Journal
editorials are. Gosh it is soooo hard to figure out where they’re coming from.”
¹⁸

To obscure the overwhelming liberal dominance of the media, the few designated media “conservatives” are cited tirelessly in testimonies to the ideological diversity in the nation’s newsrooms. Democrats in the media are editors, national correspondents, news anchors, and reporters. Republicans in the media are “from the right” polemicists grudgingly tolerated within the liberal behemoth. Republican views must be accompanied by a conspicuous warning: “Partisan Conservative Opinion Coming!” Neutral news slots are reserved for Democrats exclusively. “Balance” is created by having a liberal host a debate between a liberal and a moderate Republican.

Thus, in a typical formulation, a Gannett newspaper article on the “revolving door” between politics and the media mentions Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief and
Meet the Press
host, and Strobe Talbott, former
Time
magazine reporter, in the same breath with three Republicans who have each held the novelty “conservative” seat on CNN’s
Crossfire
— Mary Matalin, John Sununu, and Pat Buchanan.

Outside of
Fox News,
the “from the right” seat on
Crossfire
is one of the rare paid positions available for conservatives on TV. The distinction between opinion journalism and objective news coverage is seemingly impossible for liberals to grasp.
¹⁹
In addition to Buchanan, the media’s other approved Republicans include William Safire and George Will. (Noticeably, even to win a position as the designated conservative “opinion” journalist requires an IQ approximately three standard deviations above Dan Rather’s.)

Safire, the
New York Times’s
House Republican, voted for Clinton in 1992. He endorsed Clinton in a column (on the now hilarious grounds that Bush was “stonewalling” on a potential scandal within his administration).
²⁰
It is thus quite possible that not one writer or editor at the
Times
voted for Bush in 1992, when his opponent got only 43 percent of the nation’s vote. In any event, Buchanan, Safire, and Will’s counterparts are not Tim Russert or Strobe Talbott. Their true counterparts are other polemicists, like Bill Press and Juan Williams. What conservatives object to is not liberal opinion commentary, but rather ostensibly objective news coated with smears.

Even conservative pundits must be branded as such, while liberals take no ideological label. On CNN, host Aaron Brown introduced his guests as “conservative Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution” and “Richard Cohen of the
Washington Post.”
This prompted Steele to ask, “Is Richard Cohen a liberal?” Brown checked with Cohen, who replied: “On this issue.” That’s one for the philosophers: On what issue is Richard Cohen not a liberal? He’s not a polygamist? He’s troubled by forced abortions?
²¹

The
New York Times
described George Will as being able to “turn in the blink of a commercial from the cultured interviewer into the committed (or commitable) right winger.”
²²
Even as a clearly labeled conservative, Will must be further maligned as “commitable.”

The more liberals thrash about trying to prove that there are an equal number of conservatives as liberals delivering the news, the more glaring the inequity becomes. A nut website purporting to expose “conservative bias” in the media—titled “Liberal Media? Yeah, Right!”—contrasts such “center-right” journalists as Margaret Carlson and Al Hunt with the conservatives overrunning the media. The website identifies, in total, forty conservatives in the media. Almost every one is an opinion columnist. Two—William F. Buckley and R. Emmett Tyrrell—had to start their own magazines to be heard.
²³