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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: Bush and the Supreme Court: Place Your Bets (November 19, 2002) With Republicans about to control the Senate, the conditions are ripe for Rehnquist to step down. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: A Popularity Contest (November 19, 2002) In Georgia and other key states, whites turned out in unexpectedly high numbers to support Bush. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: What If This Is As Good As It Gets for Bush? (November 19, 2002) An extended period of slow growth is setting in, and President Bush needs to address it. By Clive Crook. Political Pulse: The Bush Mandate (November 12, 2002) Democrats failed to rally because they had nothing much to rally 'round: no message and no messenger. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Bias, Anyone?Surprising, perhaps, but blatant liberal bias in the media's election post-mortems has been hard to find by William Powers ..... It's been more than a week since the Republican sweep, and I've been waiting for the agony and indignation to bubble up from deep inside the U.S. news media. Most reporters vote Democratic, and many are quite passionate about their political convictions, at least in private. But according to the sacrosanct rules of big-league journalism, those convictions are not supposed to influence the news coverage. If the modern media were a church, Thou Shalt Not Be Ideological would be one of its key commandments. Its priestly class would be all those reporters who strive daily, and not always successfully, to contain their most urgent political desires and thereby appear "objective." Judging from the election reportage, newsies have gotten awfully good at keeping their political privates chastely hidden under their modest media cassocks. I woke up the morning after Election Day expecting a festival of grudging headlines and slanted ledes, a barrage of photos carefully selected to make the victors look like dangerous right-wing despots. What I got instead, engulfing the upper front page of The Washington Post, was the enormous headline "Ehrlich Stuns Townsend in Md." and a big, moving photo of a joyous Republican governor-elect embracing his equally joyous running mate. The caption: "Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and running mate Michael S. Steele, the first African American elected statewide in Maryland." It looked exactly like a liberal-media story about liberals! And it read like one, except for one spot where it read more like a conservative-media story. The Post quoted two registered Democrats on their dim view of the Democratic loser, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. "I don't think she's up to the task of being governor," said one. It was much the same elsewhere. When I turned on ABC's Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer was posing a question to a famous political pundit who had been invited on to help the GMA millions make sense of the election. One of the usual suspects from the vast liberal mediaplex, perhaps? Nah, it was Ann Coulter, the best-selling conservative author and a proponent of the theory that a totalitarian Left controls the American news business. I don't know how Coulter got on this show. Maybe she covertly joined the totalitarian Left, which then approved her appearance. Her reading of the political landscape: "September 11 reminds people we're not safe even once the Cold War is over. There are madmen out there, and you have to have a Republican in the White House." Pitted against Coulter was former Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart. Sawyer asked him why Bill Clinton didn't help the candidates for whom he campaigned—a rather unliberal question, as these things go—and the sheepish Lockhart said it wasn't Clinton's fault. So it has gone. For days I have trawled the election post-mortems for blatant lib bias, and the pickings have been exceedingly slim. Last Sunday, The New York Times offered a promising specimen, an analytical piece on the "Bush Dynasty" by political writer Adam Clymer. It was full of digs at the president and his dynastic clan, including a tart reminder that the Founding Fathers feared "any hereditary power or titles." But in its final few paragraphs, the piece took a wild turn, as Clymer verged into seeming admiration for President Bush. He closed with the thought that Bush has, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of another president, a "first-class temperament." So the man Bush once called a "major-league asshole" now thinks the victorious president is downright Rooseveltian. Who says the mainstreamers detest the Bushies? Lately, the best place to see hard-core liberal-media bias is the conservative media. This week, The Weekly Standard has a hilarious parody of The New York Times. It's a front page with the banner headline GOP WINS SENATE, NATION GIRDS FOR BUSH JUDGES, END OF CIVILIZATION. Underneath is a photo of a Ku Klux Klan night rally. Of course, you'll never see anything this extreme in the real Times, though I'm sure more than a few Timesians view the Republican juggernaut in roughly this way. Now that one ideological faction controls all three branches of the government, I find myself longing for some authentic liberal bias. Not the weasly, between-the-lines bias that we've grown used to, but open, crusading, unembarrassed bias. And not just in the opinion columns, but on the front page. Call me a hopeless independent, but I think both political parties have dangerous tendencies and need somebody to keep them honest. Who's going to keep the Republicans honest now? Not the donkey party—they're a laughingstock. Who does that leave but the media? When the president is a Democrat, liberal media bias is a genuine hazard. But when the Republicans are in power, a dose of the very same bias can be healthy. America's most powerful newsrooms are packed with people who oppose much of what the Republican Party stands for. Let's unleash a few of those Lefties from the shackles of journalistic convention and see what happens. Of course, we can't turn the news columns wholesale over to ideologues. Instead, I propose that every major media outlet designate one liberal reporter to cover this conservative government from a frankly liberal point of view. Nothing tricky or snarky, just a steady stream of news openly based on a different set of assumptions from those of the regime. I've even got a title for the job: The Adversary. It comes from "adversarial journalism," an antique, somewhat discredited concept that just might be ready for a comeback.
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 © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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