Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (12 page)

In yet another specious comparison, one syndicated columnist proclaimed: “Just as many people get their ‘news’ from Rush Limbaugh as Dan Rather.” Apart from the elusive objective/subjective distinction, it’s interesting to note that Limbaugh wasn’t hired and foisted upon an unsuspecting public by a media oligarchy. To the contrary, Limbaugh’s media bosses thought he wouldn’t sell and repeatedly fired him. It is American people— twenty million of them—who keep Limbaugh on the air. The fact that Limbaugh is simply allowed to exist is deemed the equivalent of every major network doggedly hiring and promoting only liberals to deliver and analyze the news.

At ABC News, “conservative” means the most conservative member of the Clinton administration. Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, political commentary was provided by dueling analysts George Stephanopoulos and David Gergen—both of whom worked for Clinton. Gergen has, admittedly, also worked for Republican administrations. How about Gergen and Buchanan rounding out the left and right? No. That would be unthinkable. But it seems perfectly normal for the political spectrum at ABC News to stretch all the way from Clinton staffer to Clinton staffer.

Between the two former Clinton administration staffers, only the one who never worked for any Republican administration is the one who landed a permanent position at ABC News. But not to worry, ABC’s Diane Sawyer grilled Stephanopoulos on his partisanship, saying: “You are so much about passion for politics, and it doesn’t matter to you, I mean—I really mean this. You’ve been completely nonpartisan in covering the news.”
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ABC chose as a “legal analyst” Jeffrey Toobin, a political hack duly celebrated for making things up,
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engaging in unethical behavior, and sliming other liberal journalists for a want of alacrity in bending over for Bill Clinton. Sued by his former boss Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh for violating confidentiality agreements Toobin signed with the office, a Kennedy-appointed federal appeals court judge found he had engaged in “conduct which manipulates procedure” and harshly denounced his “dubious behavior.”
²⁶

After
Newsweek
reporter Michael Isikoff turned down Toobin’s request to coauthor a book on Clinton, Toobin wrote his own book, which denounced Isikoff’s solo project as “tawdry voyeurism”—without mentioning that he had tried to get in on Isikoff’s voyeurism but was rejected. The
New York Times
book reviewer Michiko Kakutani called Toobin’s book “highly partisan” and “willfully subjective,” full of “dubious assertion[s],” “petty meanness,” “contradictions and perplexing assertions.”
²⁷
The guy who was too partisan for the
New York Times
and too unethical for Lawrence Walsh was a perfect fit as ABC’s “legal analyst.”

Merely for having authentic conservatives debate liberals (authentic meaning “did not work for the Clinton administration”), Fox News Channel is known as the “conservative” network. Until a few years ago when Fox News Channel got Brit Hume, there has been only one host of his own television show who might possibly have voted for Ronald Reagan: John McLaughlin, of his namesake
The McLaugblin Group.
Ostentatiously conservative and opinionated, McLaughlin does not purport to be neutral. His show is balanced with two liberals and two conservatives.

Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly is denounced as a “conservative” by people who believe the nation’s newsrooms accurately reflect the political spectrum. O’Reilly is anti-death penalty and pro-gun control, believes in “global warming,” and thought Elian Gonzalez should go back to Cuba— not positions generally associated with the Republican Party. Indeed, O’Reilly’s only manifest conservative credential is that he strongly disapproves of hucksters and liars.

Democrat pundit Lawrence O’Donnell captures the chummy, clubby relationship between the Democratic Party and the media when he explains that scholars with the conservative Heritage Foundation have an “advantage” in getting television bookings “when they’re deliberately trying to book pro-and-con arguments.” Affiliation with the liberal Brookings Institution, he said, makes television bookings trickier “because we don’t know what you’re going to say.”
²⁸

I know what they’re going to say! The tax cut is too big, military spending is too much, and we need an international treaty on the environment. Hearing media people describe liberals is like listening to a fish characterize water:
Water? What water?

Clinton’s national economic advisor Gene Sperling went to the Brookings Institution. Clinton’s Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alice Rivlin went to the Brookings Institution. Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers went to the Brookings Institution. (And don’t forget: Nixon broke into the Brookings Institution.) About the only Clinton administration employees who didn’t end up at the Brookings Institution are the ones delivering news at ABC.

Further distracting from the massive liberal hegemony of the media, any accidental Republicans who wander, Elmer Fudd-like, into hard news reporting are endlessly showcased to support the claim that “both sides”— Republicans as well as Democrats—pass through the “revolving door” between politics and journalism. But somehow only a Republican’s passage through the “revolving door” ever provokes frenzies of media introspection and self-criticism.

Consequently, small children can recite in their sleep that Diane Sawyer once worked for Richard Nixon. But you have to do research to find out that Brian Williams, Lesley Stahl, Jane Pauley, Jeff Greenfield, Tim Russert, Ken Bode, Bill Moyers, Rick Inderfurth, Pierre Salinger—to name a few TV news personalities—all worked for Democrats.

In another generation, no one will remember George Stephanopoulos got his big break into network news on the staff of a Democratic president. And not just any Democratic president, but one who was impeached, held in contempt by a federal judge, and disbarred by the Supreme Court. Hiring Stephanopoulos would be the equivalent of a major network hiring Chuck Colson immediately after Watergate. Interestingly, though, none of President Nixon’s henchmen made the jump to network news.

More contemporaneously, Tony Blankley’s television career has not been so illustrious or remunerative as Stephanopoulous’s. This is despite the fact that Blankley is telegenic, bright, politically astute, and—a bonus!—did not work for a felon. Rather, Blankley worked for one of the most consequential politicians in the last century—Newt Gingrich. Clinton’s aide is a rising star in television news. Gingrich’s will never be an “objective” political analyst anyplace. Instead Blankley is relegated to one of television’s conservative novelty seats. Even Gingrich himself could be hired by only one network—Fox News.

Only Republican politics is deemed “partisan.” Moving back and forth between left-wing politics and a media career is like moving from the
Washington Post
to
Newsweek.

After a heavily criticized tenure as President Clinton’s press secretary, Dee Dee Myers jumped to lucrative positions on cable news and with
Vanity Fair
magazine. She was hired at CNBC by Roger Ailes (the man now touted as the evil genius behind Fox News’s conservative bias).
Vanity Fair
created the post exclusively for Myers.
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She was scheduled to appear on the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
soon after leaving the White House, but ended up canceling on account of a drunk driving charge.
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James Carville has served as guest host on CNN’s
Larry King Live.
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It is impossible to imagine CNN choosing a guest host from among Carville’s opposites, assuming such exist. Evidently there is no Republican in the entire universe capable of leaving his subjectivity at the door the way Carville can.

When Mark Green lost the New York mayoral election in 2001, the
New York Times
casually reported that among his likely next moves—a topic of interest to precisely no one, including Mrs. Green—was his serving “as a host on a serious television talk show.”
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A spot on television seemed a logical next step for a Democrat so liberal that even New York City had rejected him.

It’s not easy to locate journalists who began their careers on the staff of a Democrat, since working for a Democrat isn’t considered a political job. Only “Republican” constitutes a political affiliation. Working for a liberal politician is deemed good solid training for an independent, mainstream journalist. It is second only to being on Nixon’s apocryphal “enemies list” as a nice shiny feather in your cap. Still, with the caveat that this is not a complete list, here are a few former Democratic staffers on television:

NBC’s Tim Russert worked for New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D) and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y).

CNN’s Jeff Greenfield was a speechwriter for Senator Bobby Kennedy (D-Mass.) and ultra-liberal New York Mayor John Lindsay.

CNBC’s Chris Matthews was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and press secretary for House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill.

NBC News chief political correspondent Ken Bode was an aide to Representative Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.) in his 1976 presidential campaign.

PBS’s Bill Moyers was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary.

NBC’s Brian Williams worked in the Carter White House.

Rick Inderfurth spent a decade as an ABC News correspondent, sandwiched between working for Senate Democrats and the Carter administration
³³
and becoming Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs.

Elizabeth Brackett of the
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
worked on the mayoral campaign of Democrat Bill Singer in Chicago and was herself a candidate for some smaller Democratic positions.
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NBC’s Jane Pauley was administrative assistant to the Indiana Democratic State Central Committee.

Pierre Salinger worked for the Kennedy administration and was briefly a Democratic senator from California (an appointed position the voters ousted him from two months later) before accepting a position “with ABC News.

Democrat journalists not only far outnumber their Republican counterparts, but outflank them on the ideological spectrum. A surprising number of establishment journalists “worked for far-left liberals whose closest counterpart on the right would be the John Birch Society.

Graduate for graduate, the office of Mayor John Lindsay seems to have launched more big-name media stars than the Columbia School of Journalism. Though at the beginning of his political career Lindsay called himself a Republican, even the
New York Times
wasn’t fooled, describing his reign as a melange of “failed liberal experiments ... unwieldy government super-agencies and a mistaken belief that the city could tax itself out of financial troubles.”
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Among the media careers that began on Mayor Lindsay’s political staff are Lesley Stahl (CBS), Jeff Greenfield (CNN), Ken Auletta
(New Yorker),
Jeffrey Katzenberg (Disney and Dreamworks), and Steven Brill (muckraking liberal journalist at large).

As the poll of Washington political reporters suggests, print journalists also represent an ideological span from Democrat to far-left Democrat. Some of the former Democratic staffers who now write the news are the following:

David Shipley went straight from the Clinton White House, where he was speechwriter for both Bill and Hillary, to being a writer and editor at the
New York Times
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—where his wife, who worked for Gore, was fawningly profiled without mention of her husband’s job.
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Ken Auletta, who writes about politics and the media for the
New Yorker,
embarked on his career in journalism by working for a series of liberal Democrats. Auletta served in the Johnson administration as special assistant to the undersecretary of commerce; worked on Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign; managed both of Democratic Howard J. Samuels’s campaigns for governor of New York; and was the executive director of the New York City Off Track Betting Corporation under Mayor John Lindsay. (A LexisNexis search turns up no documents that mention Auletta worked for Johnson, Kennedy, or Lindsay.)

Leslie Gelb was a national security columnist and deputy editorial page editor for the
New York Times
amid stints on the staff of Senator Jacob Javits, President Lyndon Johnson, and President Jimmy Carter.
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James Fallows, who was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter, has been the Washington editor of the
Atlantic Monthly,
a writer for the
New York Times Magazine,
the
Industry Standard,
the
New Yorker,
and the
American Prospect.

Tom Johnson, former publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
and former CNN chairman and chief executive, was an aide to Lyndon Johnson.

Walter Pincus writes about national security for the
Washington Post
and has been a consultant for both CBS and NBC News.
³⁹
He “twice took sabbaticals” from journalism, as he put it, “to run investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when its chairman was J. W. Fulbnght (D-Ark.).” His wife was a political appointee in the Clinton administration.

Jack Rosenthal was a Washington correspondent for the
New York Times
and served for many years as the editorial page editor. Rosenthal served in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, including as executive assistant to undersecretary of state in the Johnson administration.