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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Therapeutic Cloning: Why Congress Should Butt Out (December 18, 2001) Forget about a national law. Let states go their separate ways, as they are doing already. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Politically Correct Idealogues, Still Stuck In Their Ruts (December 18, 2001) A bah-humbug for Norman Mineta, John Ashcroft, leftist professors, Republican tax-cutters, and Jerry Falwell. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Domestic Issues Making a Comeback (December 18, 2001) The surprising thing about the trade vote was how hard Bush had to work to win. By William Schneider. Political Pulse: For Now, Lobbyists Own the Day (December 11, 2001) Because of September 11, almost nobody's paying attention to what Congress is doing. By William Schneider. On Books: Footnote to an Act of Domestic Terror (December 11, 2001) A review of Greg Robinson's By Order of the President. By S. Scott Rohrer. Legal Affairs: Don't Treat Innocent People Like Criminals (December 11, 2001) Officials should treat detentions as a regrettable but necessary evil. Instead, they're treating detainees like terrorists. By Stuart Taylor Jr. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The Phony WarThe woods are full of pressies eager to return to toxic, '90s-style ideological battles by William Powers ..... Last week, Jim Romenesko's MediaNews, a popular Web site for and about journalists, ran an item about a Florida newspaper's decision to drop Maureen Dowd's syndicated columns from its op-ed rotation. A reader of the paper had written Romenesko to report that The New York Times columnist was being dumped, and to suggest a dark motive. "My local paper, the Key West Citizen, has been running columns by Maureen Dowd on a weekly basis," wrote Elizabeth Halbe. "While always well written and full of pointed humor, they have drawn (of course) the wrath of some ultraconservative readers. Today the Citizen printed a reader's call insisting that since she is a 'liberal extremist,' her column be dropped from our paper, followed by an editor's note that Dowd's column is being discontinued in January." At first glance, this looked like a sign that maybe the partisan strife of the 1990s, the bonfire of inanities that played out daily in the Clinton-era media, was returning after a short absence. For a few months there, the war on global terrorism had made the war of domestic vitriol deeply unfashionable. Now, down in loony old Florida (where else?), ideology was making a comeback. It was only a matter of time before Lanny Davis, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the '90s freak show were back in our living rooms every night. Since the editor's note appeared to be a direct response to the complaining reader, one could see why Kalbe thought partisanship was behind the decision to drop Dowd. But there were a few nagging problems with this story. One was that Maureen Dowd really has no ideology; like Mikey in the Life Cereal ads, she hates everything pretty much equally. The other problem was that Key West, which hosts an annual drag race for drag queens, is not what you'd call a hotbed of conservative culture. Sure enough, a message soon reached Romenesko from the editor of the Key West paper, Tom Tuell: "The Citizen made the decision earlier this year to drop The New York Times services, including Dowd's column, for economic reasons. The decision had nothing to do with complaints about the column. In hindsight, our note at the end of a reader comment should have been more clear." This little episode is emblematic of a phenomenon that's happened over and over in recent weeks. Stories keep bubbling up that look and feel a lot like the partisan brawling of a few years ago, except now the stuff has no legs. In this instance, the ideological angle not only wasn't authentic, it was questionable on its face. Still, I bet I wasn't the only reader who saw the Dowd item, initially believed it was all about ideology, and almost tasted the bitter old '90s roaring back. OK, it's all starting up again, I thought. But it wasn't, and isn't, not right now. Though there are folks out here in MediaLand who clearly wish it were, and I'm not talking about people like that innocently mistaken Romenesko reader. Ever since the initial shock of the September attacks wore off, a hardy band of media warriors, from both the Left and the Right, have been working diligently to rekindle the old partisan flames that were dampened to a remarkable degree by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They tend to be people who thrived and prospered in the animosity of the Clinton period, and who have a vested interest in seeing that very special, very foul atmosphere return. The Drudge Report this week had a headline that read, all in capital letters: "MY BEATING BY REFUGEES IS A SYMBOL OF THE HATRED AND FURY OF THIS FILTHY WAR." A click took you to The Independent newspaper of London, and a first-person article by Robert Fisk, the British journalist who was beaten by a gang of refugees near the Afghan-Pakistani border. He appears to feel that the United States, not Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, is the really bad guy in this war. This makes him a member of a very small minority, not just in Britain but in much of the industrialized world—and among journalists. But it's a view that serves the purposes of the media's ideological warriors. The left-wingers would agree wholeheartedly with Fisk, and the right-wingers would see in him confirmation of all their suspicions about the pink, peacenik media. Indeed, the conservative Drudge wasn't the only one who played up Fisk's piece. The Web site of the leftist political newsletter CounterPunch simultaneously ran the story on its front page. The right and left fringes are never very far apart. In October, I was on the receiving end of a mass e-mail from a leftist friend, forwarding an article written by an Indian novelist for a London newspaper. It was anti-war, and stunningly sympathetic to the cause of the September 11 terrorists. Evil conservatives are destroying civilization. More recently, I got an e-mail from a rightist friend of mine, forwarding a claim (since disproved) that Ollie North warned us way back in 1987 about the evils of Osama bin Laden. Evil liberals are destroying civilization. None of this is getting any traction. Despite what the Right and the Left want to believe, there is no great ideological dissension over this war, not now anyway. Last weekend, National Public Radio aired a piece about how even in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, home of the '60s counterculture, there have been no war protests, and American flags are hanging all around. As the polls confirm, these are not ugly ideological times, no matter how much a few silly media people wish it were so.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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