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  iberal
media conspiracy falls flat," read the wishful headline over
one of Howard Kurtz's Washington Post online media summations.
He recited the old liberal-bias theory that the media favor Democrats,
then touted a newer theory:
That the
conservative press is purely partisan, while the mainstream weenie
press is concerned with issues like fairness and balance —
and, in fact, often criticized Bill Clinton and other Democrats.
That it's not really an even fight, heavyweight boxers versus
high school debaters. That Democrats are actually hamstrung because
they try to play to the major editorial pages, while the Republicans,
with knives in their teeth, couldn't care less.
This theory
belongs to Paul Glastris, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly
and for many years a member of the alleged mainstream weenie press
at U.S. News & World Report. The article asks "Why
Can't the Democrats Get Tough?" While he describes Team Bush
as "ruthless," almost every Democrat seems to be too milquetoasty
for Glastris, from Al Gore to Tom Daschle to George Stephanopoulos.
One major reason, he suggests, is an imbalance of ruthlessness in
the media.
"Democrats
in Washington focus incessantly on the establishment press: the
New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek,
CBS, CNN, NPR. That is where their worldview is shaped, and where
they look for validation of their ideas and status. Republicans
are hardly indifferent to the establishment outlets. But they increasingly
take their cue from the expanding alternative universe of conservative
media: the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, talk radio, Fox News Channel." Glastris claims
that despite a modicum of liberal bias, the establishment takes
seriously the ideas of fairness and balance, while the conservative
press does not.
This theory
throws a lot of oranges and apples into the same juicer. Clearly,
talk-radio hosts and editorial writers aren't going to pretend to
be as decorously neutral as "objective" reporters might.
Conservative media critics almost never fuss about editorials, because
the news pages offer plenty of examples of editorializing where
it's not supposed to be found. Wouldn't it be fairer to compare
reporters to reporters, and editorialists to editorialists? If Glastris
believes Fox newscasts doesn't "take seriously the ideas of
fairness and balance," he's clearly not setting Fox newscasts
alongside ABC or CBS and exploring who's more serious. (For Democrats,
Fox's image is often made by O'Reilly/Hannity feistiness on talk
shows, not news shows.) I doubt Glastris will ever find Brit Hume
describing a Tom Daschle plan the way Dan Rather liked to describe
the Gingrich Republicans, and their plans to "demolish or damage
government aid programs, most of them for the poor and elderly."
Glastris wants the Democrats to wield a "partisan stiletto,"
but the supposedly mainstream weenie press is hardly going to lose
a ruthlessness competition to conservative outlets.
Glastris begins
his wimpy-Democrats lament with an example of Republican "thuggishness"
late in the 2000 recount season, when jacket-and-tie GOP protesters
helped stop a Miami recount. Apparently, Gore failed the toughness
test by failing to send counterprotesters, fearing a bad reaction
from Howell Raines. But the mainstream weenie press sounded just
like Glastris, covering these events in a classic Democrat-pleasing
way.
Just take the
news magazines. U.S. News reporter Roger Simon quoted Rep.
Jerry Nadler's claim that "A whiff of fascism is in the air,"
and for good measure, added Small Business Administration Deputy
Administrator Fred P. Hochberg: ''My family came here from Nazi
Germany. My uncle was thrown down a flight of stairs...because of
who he was. To have it happen in America is just shocking."
Newsweek quoted Nadler, too, but found it "a little
overwrought." You think? Time's article was entitled
"Mob Scene in Miami." The table of contents asked, "who
led the riot?" The article called it a "melee." They
all took whatever Democratic tough talk there was, and amplified
it, with the slightest of reservations.
Glastris can't
find any ruthless liberals on the talk shows, either:
Conservatives
such as Robert Novak, Kate O'Beirne, and Jonah Goldberg are ideological
warriors who attempt with every utterance to advance their cause.
Their center-left counterparts, people such as Juan Williams,
Margaret Carlson, and E. J. Dionne, simply don't have the same
killer instinct. While their sympathies are obvious, liberal pundits
are at heart political reporters, not polemicists, who seem far
more at ease on journalistic neutral ground...rather than in vigorously
defending Democrats.
Again, Glastris
hasn't been paying attention if he hasn't noticed Margaret's wild
remarks about Republicans spoiling all the meat and poisoning all
the well water. But if liberals can't stand allegedly weak-kneed
reporters manning the talk-show booths, then why have they always
posted them there? Why don't they throw them out now and find the
feisty liberal Bobs, Kates, and Jonahs?
As with most
media theorists, Glastris is basing his theory not on a rigorous
content analysis, but on the sum of his partisan impressions. He
clearly hasn't hung around conservative watercoolers, where the
discussion is often much the same, lamenting the failure of Republicans
to play tougher, and wishing they would not run scared when a little
partisanship could win the day. To be convincing, media theories
ought to be based on more than impressions. It's easy to feel that
President Bush is getting a free ride when he has a stellar approval
rating, and those numbers can lead to some pussyfooting around the
popular mood. But if Al Gore didn't get elected and Tom Daschle
didn't stop the Bush tax cuts, the last people who deserve to be
blamed are the so-called mainstream weenie press. Studying the content
of the news would show they favored both of those losing campaigns.
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