Archives: The Myth of the Liberal Media
William Kristol, as reported by the New Yorker, 5/22/95
Collated by the editors
Cross with Right Wing Myths ExposedRussert's long and faithful service to corporate power—especially GE— merited a gushing exit. Good riddance. Unfortunately, many other lavishly paid media courtiers remain.
Based on its recent direct-mail campaign, one of the [Leadership Institute’s] primary fund- raising strategies is to convince conservative donors that its graduates can neutralize what it regards as left-leaning news media.
“Liberal media bias is out of control,” said the letter, which was mailed over [Rep. J.C.] Watts’s signature, but which [the institute’s founder and president] Mr. Blackwell said was written at the institute. “It’s indecent. It’s time you and I did something about it.”
When asked for examples of how bias by news organizations was undermining the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Blackwell complained about what he described as excessive press attention paid to Mr. Bush’s critics, like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.
An alumna of the institute, who was recommended by Mr. Blackwell, found it difficult to cite cases of “out of control” liberal bias in recent news coverage.
“I have been in local TV newsrooms in Phoenix, Seattle and Pittsburgh, and I don’t think there is bias, either liberal or conservative,” said the alumna, Tallee Whitehorn, 27, an assistant news director at WTAE- TV, an ABC affiliate in Pittsburgh. “This is not really a place for it, unless I wanted to get a lot of hate mail, which I don’t.”
The young people in Mr. Montini’s class were also hard-pressed to come up with examples of the news- media bias mentioned in Mr. Watts’s fund-raising letter.
Mr. Tietz said he had been sensitized to such matters in recent months by reading conservative books, including Whitaker Chambers’s “Witness.” That book, Mr. Tietz said, “explains the deep-down meanness of the left.”
But as for seeing that meanness in coverage of President Bush, Mr. Tietz said, “Honestly, I haven’t noticed it one way or another.” (From a June 11, 2001 New York Times article on the Leadership Institute (a training camp for conservative journalists) titled “In Virginia, Young Conservatives Learn How to Develop and Use Their Political Voices”)
“Throughout 2000, with less pretense of objectivity than ever, [Tim] Russert [a repugnant corpojournalist hack whose death triggered an outburst of ludicrous eulogization from fellow “journalists”] dutifully echoed the Republican theme that the Democratic nominee was “dishonest”. Week after week, the topic on Meet The Press was the “repeated lying” of Al Gore. One lowlight of Russert’s descent into shameless propagandist occurred when it was revealed that George W. Bush had been convicted of drunk driving in Maine, thereby proving that the Republican candidate had been deceitful when he was questioned about whether he had ever been arrested.
Russert’s immediate response on national television was, “The question on everybody’s mind is, ‘Did the Gore campaign have something to do with the release of this information?’” That was not the question on everybody’s mind; a poll taken immediately after the revelation showed that most Americans did not believe that Gore was involved.
It was, however, the question being faxed nationally by the Republicans in a memo circulated to their operatives who were responsible for diverting attention from the fact that their candidate was guilty of, for want of a better term, “repeated lying”.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Russert established a link between Meet The Press and the G.O.P. opposition research team that was responsible for digging up dirt/manufacturing dirt on Al Gore. On election night, after conferring with Welch, Russert demanded that Gore quit the race before the legally mandated recount took place in Florida. The next morning, on the Today Show, he repeated the demand.
(…) He exaggerates Democratic wrongdoing, going to the extreme of inventing criminal behavior. Conversely, he has been unrelentingly oblivious to all Republican scandals; his infinite fascination with the missing intern in the case of Democrat Gary Condit was accompanied by total disinterest in the dead intern who was found on the office floor of Republican Joe Scarbrough. Russert spent years obsessing about an ill fated land deal called Whitewater that involved a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but he remains indifferent to the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer funded kickbacks that George W. Bush has been ladling out to his campaign contributors. ” (From a January 9th, 2002 article on GE’s leading media whore, Tim Russert, among other things a Washington, DC spy for Jack Welch)
For conservatives of every persuasion, it is a self-evident truth that the mass media are liberally biased. As a proud liberal myself, I wish it was true: where are those liberal TV channels? Could I please sign up for them? All I get on my satelite system are center-right channels such as CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and far-right channels such as the “we distort, you deride”, Fox News, owned by equally far-right media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and assorted christian nutball channels such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network or Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, carried by Fox Family.
Believing in freedom of speech, I do not mind that far-right viewpoints are presented on TV on a daily basis. What I strongly object to is that these viewpoints are not balanced by equally far-left viewpoints. Tune to CNN’s Capital Gang, and you’ll see a centrist TIME columnist (Margaret Carlson) and a socially liberal but economically conservative Wall Street Journal Editor (Al Hunt) debate two rabid right wingers, Kate O’Beirne and Robert Novak. Progressive voices are completely shut out from the program. Or tune to Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes which is nothing but a thinly veiled solo show for far-right firebrand Sean Hannity who is so “balanced” by the tame Colmes that he might just as well be opposed by a scarecrow made to look like Colmes. College dropout Hannity does almost all of the talking; he introduces guests from the “Family Research” Council as “our good friend from the FRC”, habitually refers to his own views and those of regular guest Jerry Falwell as “christian” without any qualifier (ignoring the fact that religious right views are not representative of mainstream christianity), and treats liberal guests as mere props to get his own point of view across, which usually involves interrupting and screaming. Fair and Balanced?
Hardly. But by Fox standards, Hannity & Colmes is about as fair and unbiased as it gets. Usually, Fox News’ idea of fairness and balance involves having a center-right conservative disagree with a far-right conservative, and calling that travesty a debate, or letting a conservative (but never a liberal) have his own show altogether. How come that everytime Bill O’Reilly takes a break from The O’Reilly Factor, his substitute is someone from the far right of the political spectrum, such as former congressman and now syndicated radio host Bob Dornan or hard-right nitwit Michael Reagan (who left the GOP because it was not radical enough)? And why is it that 8 years of unrelenting, non-stop demonization of Clinton and his wife by these people is okay, but suggesting that Bush is illegitimate is “partisan rancor”? The answer is of course that Foxnews is a conservative news outlet, even though its on-air personel asserts the contrary (“fair and balanced”) like a mantra.
But the situation is hardly any better on the other (supposedly liberal) cable news channels. Liberals or centrists may not be on unless their viewpoints are ‘balanced’ by conservative viewpoints (as in CNN’s Capital Gang or Crossfire), while hard-right pundits such as Christ Matthews get their own shows. ABC’s 20/20 regularly features the views of pro-corporate extremist John Stossel, but does not bother to balance those views by a progressive perspective. Commenting on a 1998 Stossel piece which made the case that greed is good, FAIR demanded “to see an equally outspoken progressive journalist given an hour to explain why greed is a serious problem in American society”. Needless to say that that demand went unanswered. Stossel, despite a documented history of using deceptive statistics, one-sided witness testimony, distortions and outright lies to promote an extremist agenda is still on the job at ABC.
Not only does the “liberal media” claim has no basis in fact, it also does not make sense considering the issues of media ownership and influence of advertisers. Most media outlets are owned by a handful of conservative corporations and individuals, and funded by usually economically conservative advertisers who have no need for an educated, alert, independent and critical citizenry. What they need is a dumb, bored, cynical and apathetic public that has abandoned all critical faculties and is easily distracted by celebrity gossip and mindless sports games. A public that will believe anything it is told, or nothing at all, which amounts to the same end result. This pro-corporate conservative bias of the media is well-documented and shows itself in consistent under-reporting or ignoring of any information that would lead people to question the fundamental status quo.
Further MUST Reading:
MICHAEL McCHESNEY:
THE PROBLEM OF THE MEDIA : U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Buy it used for less than a dollar!)
JEFF COHEN
CABLE NEWS CONFIDENTIAL
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