How conservatives control the media, and pretend they don't
By Eric Alterman, 3/30/2003
AS THE WAR IN IRAQ BEGAN, a Pentagon spokesperson with the US Central
Command pronounced himself ''extremely happy with the coverage.'' And
indeed, it's not surprising that government officials should give thanks to the media. If all you did was watch the war on television, you'd hardly know any Iraqis were being killed, or that most of the world considers this war to be both illegal and unjustified, or that the hated Hussein most likely had nothing to do with 9/11 and has even been given a clean bill of health regarding anti-US terrorism over the past decade by our own CIA. Just where, viewers might be forgiven for asking, is this ''liberal media'' conservatives have been complaining about all these years?
Repeat something often enough and people will believe it, goes the old
adage, and this is nowhere truer than in American political journalism.
In a study of the past three presidential elections published in the Journal of Communication, a group of scholars observe that ''claiming the media are liberally biased perhaps has become a core rhetorical strategy by conservative elites in recent years.'' In other words, conservatives, by airing their baseless accusation of liberal bias again and again, have successfully cowed journalists into repeating it themselves.
In fact, the mass media are not ''liberal'' and have not been for decades.
True, a majority of journalists no doubt vote Democrat and hold generally liberal views on issues such as gun control, abortion, and school prayer.
But this does not translate into news coverage that tilts consistently to the left. There are several reasons for this. Conservative journalists are more ideologically driven and pure-minded than liberal journalists.
Meanwhile, liberal journalists themselves are less liberal than is widely believed, and in any case unlikely to challenge the powerful companies that employ them. Finally, the very definition of liberalism that shapes public discussion of these issues is a terribly limited and misleading one.
In recent years, a coterie of conservative activists and journalists has used the media to shape and sustain news stories in ways that liberals can only envy. In 2001, the Washington Post White House reporter John Harris pointed out that from the moment Bill Clinton entered office, ''conservative interest groups, commentators and congressional investigators waged a remorseless campaign that they hoped would make life miserable for Clinton and vault themselves to power. They succeeded in many ways. One of the most important was their ability to take all manner of presidential miscues, misjudgments or controversial decisions and exploit them for maximum effect. Stories like the travel office firings flamed for weeks instead of receding into yesterday's news. And they colored the prism through which many Americans, not just conservative ideologues, viewed Clinton. It is Bush's good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist.''
There's little doubt that most journalists, as the sociologist Herbert Gans has explained, are congenitally ''reformist.'' They believe in the possibility of improving things or they would not have chosen the profession in the first place. But this reformist sympathy, as well as most elite journalists' status as well-paid, urban, ''blue state'' professionals, can cut more than one way, in political terms. Beginning
with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and accelerating in 1994, conservatives began to capture the language of reformism, in opposition
to what Newt Gingrich termed ''reactionary liberalism.'' Much of the media bought into this new vocabulary, and hence, a bias toward ''reform'' gives little clue about a person's ideology anymore. Journalists were naturally in sympathy with efforts to reform our campaign finance laws. But they also appeared well-disposed to entertaining the idea of ''reforming'' the nation's Social Security system by introducing private stock market accounts-at least before the Nasdaq crashed.
Whatever the personal beliefs of Washington journalists, one must still
ask whether those predilections necessarily lead to a bias in coverage.
The answer is, it is not entirely clear. After all, elite journalists do not shape the news alone. Most of them work for a shrinking number of media conglomerates, and one way or another, those corporations'
far-flung and overlapping interests also influence the presentation of the news.
Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley, has been chronicling the concentration of media ownership in five separate editions of his book, ''The Media Monopoly.'' When he first published his study in 1983, there were 50 companies that controlled the information flow. Today we are down to six.
The chief problem with media concentration from a journalistic standpoint is the enormous potential it creates for conflict of interest. While some editors and producers claim to scrutinize their own parent companies' properties with zeal, the claim taxes credulity. Nor can one count on competing media companies to provide more rigorous coverage: The number of those companies has diminished, and many of them look out for one another's interests. Meanwhile, the perennial question of advertiser influence remains. One-third of the local TV news directors surveyed by the Project on Excellence in Journalism in 2000 indicated that they had been pressured to avoid negative stories about advertisers, or to do positive ones. As the editors of the Columbia Journalism Review put it: ''The truth about self-censorship is that it is widespread, as common in newsrooms as deadline pressure, a virus that eats away at the journalistic mission.''
Pro-business pundits such as William Powers of the National Journal argue that the media ''subscribe to the biblical view that money is the root of all evil, and [their] job is to expose that evil through news stories about bad companies.'' And indeed, many reporters have reacted to the troubles of Enron, WorldCom, and the like with serious and aggressive investigations into corporate misdeeds. But Powers must have slept through the 1990s. Journalists have always tried to ''follow the money,'' but until the past decade, never have they done so with quite such visible longing. During the great stock market boom, journalists embraced the Zeitgeist of capitalist heroism with a zest that must have shocked and surprised many CEOs, who suddenly found themselves receiving the kind of coverage usually reserved for NBA stars.
Editors and reporters often portrayed executives on their covers in the costumes of comic-book superheros. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems was portrayed as ''JAVAMAN,'' cape and all, on the cover of Fortune. Apple's Steve Jobs was termed ''STEVIE WONDER!'' for his star turn in the same publication. In 1997, the New York Times praised WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers as ''A Long-Distance Visionary''; he was a ''blunt, folksy…entrepreneurial stepchild of the telecommunications revolution,'' a former ''high-school basketball coach'' who ''even mows his own lawn.'' Meanwhile, the media's single-minded emphasis on ''wealth creation'' crowded out concerns for virtually everything that might be perceived to interfere with it, such as workers' pay, environmental destruction, and, as investors found to their deep chagrin, honest accounting.
If nothing else, the ''liberal'' media's soft treatment of 1990s CEOs suggests there's something fundamentally wrong with the most widely used definitions of liberalism itself. The right's ideological offensive of the past few decades has succeeded so thoroughly that the very idea of a ''liberal'' politics has changed utterly. On network television, pundits as middle-of-the-road and cautious as David Broder and Al Hunt are routinely labeled ''liberal.''
But should we accept this arbitrary notion of the political spectrum?
In the academic world, definitions of liberalism derive largely from the work of the late political philosopher John Rawls, who asked us to imagine what kind of social compact would be agreed to by people who have no idea of their own talents and privileges. A just political system, he argued, would appear equally fair to someone at the bottom and to someone at the top, the CEO as well as the guy who cleans toilets.
In real-world American politics, the proposition would be considered so utopian as to be laughable. The steps that would need to be taken to reach a Rawlsian state are politically unthinkable, beginning with a steeply progressive income tax, as well as the universal distribution of high-quality health care, education, and housing, and the spread of political power. The ethicist Peter Singer notes, moreover, that even Rawls's demanding standards do not take into account our responsibilities as citizens to those who live beyond our borders, in places where starvation, disease, and child mortality are rampant. Meeting such responsibilities are also fundamental liberal causes, almost entirely unmentionable in a society that offers the world's poor barely one-tenth of one percent of its gross domestic product in development aid.
Judged by this standard, even to begin to argue on behalf of a generally liberal political program is to invite amused condescension at best. Woe unto the liberal Rawlsian who accidentally wandered onto the set of ''Meet the Press'' to argue for a comprehensive plan for social justice for everyone regardless of wealth, social rank, or political power. He might as well argue for more traffic signals on Mars for all the seriousness with which such arguments would be treated. Indeed, perhaps nowhere is genuine liberalism treated more contemptuously than in the so-called ''liberal media.'' And therein, perhaps, lies the conservatives' most enduring political victory.
[This message was edited by radiofreecostarica on 03-31-03 at 01:51 PM.]
