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December
10, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
Frustrated
and Dizzy
On
Tom Daschle, et. al.
By NR
Editors, from the December 23, 2002, issue of National Review
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he media is
kind of weird these days," said Al Gore. Let us interpret that for
you: There are some conservative voices getting through, and that's not
at all what Gore and other liberal Democrats are used to. From birth,
they expected a thoroughly liberal media: It was an entitlement. And now
there are all these . . . interlopers (or "fifth columnists,"
about which more in a minute). In the weeks following the Republicans'
surprise victory in the November election, there's been a whole lot of
whining going on. Pardon us if we don't get teary-eyed over these charges
of conservative media bias.
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The former vice president
went on to list "Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush
Limbaugh — there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed
by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with
Republican administrations and the rest of the media." As WFB has
pointed out, "Non-wealthy billionaires are presumably too busy trying
to become wealthy billionaires to give much time to politics." Continued
Gore, "Most of the media has been slow to recognize the pervasive
impact of this fifth column in their ranks." No one could have said
it more revealingly: that non-liberal media constitute a "fifth column,"
that is, a secret group of collaborators with the enemy, subverting the
nation from within.
Tom Daschle, too,
revealed his frustration, now that he has been returned to minority status.
He went for a familiar Democratic target: Big Bad Rush, scourge of the
Republic (though not of the Republicans). Daschle accused Rush Limbaugh
of inciting crazies against him and other Democrats, comparing him to
fundamentalist zealots abroad (you-know-who). You will remember that Bill
Clinton, as the Oklahoma City federal building lay in ruins, took the
occasion of a collegiate address to blame conservative talk radio for
creating a climate in which mass murder can take place. It may have been
the lowest moment of the Clinton presidency — and that's not to exclude
anything that happened in hallways near the Oval Office.
Rush, as usual, got
it right. In response to Daschle, he noted the new prominence of some
conservative or right-leaning news outlets, and said, "Suddenly these
liberal politicians have to fight in the arena of ideas . . . I'm sure
Sen. Daschle would love it if nobody were out there" contradicting
him on points of policy, but "that's not how free speech works."
Then there's the
case of Fox News. It was Christmas morning — early — for Democrats
when Bob Woodward revealed that Roger Ailes, the Fox chief, had sent President
Bush a letter nine days after September 11, urging him, basically —
in the language of Margaret Thatcher — not to go wobbly. He advised
the president that Americans would be patient in this new war as long
as they were confident that Bush, ultimately, would do the necessary.
Good advice. But
wasn't this proof that Ailes was not a real newsman but a Republican party
toady? Ailes had a (typically) smart answer to this: "I don't give
a damn [for a start]. American citizenship is a big concept. If I had
to give that up to be in journalism, I wouldn't do it. What I wrote was
completely nonpartisan. I would have written the same letter to FDR after
Pearl Harbor. If Bill Clinton had been president, I probably would have
sent him the same memo."
Liberal critics enjoy
listing the conservative outlets (or outposts, you might even call them):
Fox, the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Wall
Street Journal editorial page, Drudge. (It doesn't take long to go
through them, which is why critics list them all the time.) Fine. How
about a trade? We'll take the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, CBS, NBC, ABC (news and entertainment
divisions, thank you very much), Time, Newsweek, NPR, PBS
. . . And then there's the movies, the teachers unions, the universities
. . .
Again: Pardon us
if we don't tear up.
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