South Park Conservatives: The Interview (1)
Power Line
Brian Anderson is the managing editor of City Journal magazine, the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Instititute, and the author of the new book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. The book is instructive, entertaining, and heartening. Power Line is a small part of the story that Brian has to tell in the book.
We asked Brian if he would consent to give us a thematic tour of the book in the hope that both the book and the interview would prove of interest to our readers. We forwarded Brian a set of questions about the book, and he has responded in a manner that has caused our cup to overflow.
We'll break the interview into two parts. Below Brian discusses the phenomenon of liberal media bias, the rise of conservative talk radio, and the impact of FOX News. Tomorrow in part two of the interview we take up the subject the blogosphere, the rise of conservative publishing, and campus conservatives.
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, we proudly present the Power Line interview with Brian Anderson.
PL: We're huge fans of City Journal. How does the book relate to your work with the magazine?
BA: Thanks, Scott; we're glad we have such discriminating readers as the Power Line team.
The book grows directly out of work I've been doing for Myron Magnet in City Journal, in particular a piece I wrote in late 2003 called "We're Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore" that received an extraordinary amount of attention. The book expands on and develops the central argument of that essay: that a technology and market-driven revolution in mass communications-the arrival of political talk radio during the late 1980s and early 90s; cable television's expansion during that decade, especially the creation of Fox News in 1996; and the explosion of the blogosphere just over the last few years-has overthrown the Left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information, which had long allowed liberal opinion makers to ignore or dismiss by denunciation right-of-center arguments and perspectives. A key dimension of this shift is the emergence of an irreverent anti-liberal attitude-"South Park conservatism"-in some of today's top satirical comedy and among college students sick to death of the PC nonsense rampant on many campuses.
The book is a kind of "brief history of new media," a look at where our politics and culture are heading-I think it provides at least a partial explanation for why Republicans control the White House and Congress. It's a celebration of a much wilder and richer public debate.
PL: The subtitle of your book is "The Revolt against Liberal Media Bias." What's the evidence that the MSM are biased?
BA: I have a chapter you could call "Liberal Bias for Dummies"-a swift and I hope entertaining (or maybe infuriating is the better word) overview of the mountain of evidence, both anecdotal and social scientific, on the liberal tilt of mass media over the last few decades. It's a subject that's been done to death, so I don't spend too much time on it in South Park Conservatives. But in surveying the evidence, I was still shocked by how blatant it all has been, Rathergate included. Nor is it all that surprising. As study after study has shown, nine out of ten journalists in the mainstream are liberals. Their values are inevitably going to influence what they deem newsworthy, even if they're striving to be impartial, which isn't always the case.
A couple of my favorite examples of bias haven't received as much attention as the New York Times's anti-Bush distortions and relentlessly pessimistic coverage of the War on Terror or CBS News, and are worth recalling here. One was brought to light by Power Line, as far as I know, and it is simply astonishing, when you think about it: that an AP reporter covering the 2004 presidential campaign, Jennifer Loven, was married to a top John Kerry environmental adviser-and wrote snarky "news" pieces on President Bush's environmental policies that could have been drafted by her husband. Who knows, maybe they were!
The second example was provided by the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Hassett and John Lott last year. They did a fascinating econometric study looking at newspaper headlines and AP reports on the economy going back to the mid-eighties, and found them to be considerably gloomier when a Republican sat in the White House, regardless of the economic data the stories reported. There really is a "talking down" of the economy in the elite media when it hurts the Right. It's still going on: I quote a Chicago Tribune headline from early last year, greeting news of vigorous fourth-quarter 2003 growth of 4 percent- "GDP Growth Disappoints: Job Worries Linger."
PL: Your book argues that the revolt started with talk radio. What's the story?
BA: Political talk radio doesn't receive sufficient attention as a powerful culture-shaping force. There's been nothing book-length written on the medium by any conservative writer, for instance, even though the Right has benefited tremendously from it, and only a handful of books by liberals, generally disapproving of Rush Limbaugh and his emulators.
Political talk so much part of our national fabric these days that people forget how new it is. As I explain in my chapter, it owes its existence to Ronald Reagan, whose FCC phased out the Fairness Doctrine in the late 1980s. That doctrine required broadcasters airing political opinions to provide equal time for opposing views. In practice, this would mean a station that broadcast, say, Sean Hannity, and had millions of listeners for his show would also have to air Al Franken or some other left-wing equivalent, even if the ratings stunk, as Air America's do (click here - latimes.com ). What station could run the risk? Better to broadcast blandness.
With the Fairness Doctrine lifted, talk radio exploded: in the early 1980s, there were only 75 or so stations broadcasting talk shows of any kind on the airwaves; today, there's roughly 1,400, and there are more than 4,000 hosts broadcasting. And conservatives have flourished in the medium, dominating the ratings and outnumbering liberal hosts by a wide margin. Air America has proven ratings-challenged since its launch a year ago, as The Radio Equalizer blog has been documenting. Here in New York City, it is down near the bottom of the Arbitron ratings.
There are several reasons I run through for the conservative success and the failure of left-wing talk: the presence of liberals everywhere else in the media; the entertainment value of the better right-of-center hosts, who put on informative and entertaining, often funny shows; and, not least, that the Right has got the better arguments on its side in my view. It's got nothing to do with Mario Cuomo's explanation: that liberals are too smart for the medium, writing with "fine-quill" pens, as he put it, as opposed to conservatives, who use "crayons." That's an incredibly elitist formulation.
Beginning the revolt against liberal media, political talk radio has proven remarkably influential. Over 20 percent of adult Americans claim to get informed by it, and nearly 40 percent tune in at least occasionally. Many observers credit Rush and the early talk hosts for helping sink Hillarycare, and there's no question Limbaugh's backing helped get George W. Bush past John McCain back in the Republican primaries in 2000.
PL: What's the FOX effect?
BA: Fox News has been a revolution all on its own. Nothing gets liberals more worked up. The latest example was William Raspberry's column the other day, worrying about the "metastasizing" effect of Fox, whose "in-your-face right-wing propagandizing," he says, could wind up "debasing" our news media. From Al Gore calling Fox a dangerous "fifth column" to Time Warner chairman Dick Parsons denouncing it as "crazy people exchanging views," there's been an ongoing liberal effort to discredit it-with Howard Dean even suggesting at one point he'd like to see it broken up by government regulation. In my chapter on Fox News, I offer a number of examples of this war on the network.
There are several reasons why Fox drives liberals nuts. One, it has proven wildly successful-Fox now beats its four cable news competitors combined in audience share-by reaching out to viewers whose political views and moral values aren't reflected in the liberal mainstream media. As I detail in my Fox chapter, the station is generally respectful of religious believers, is populist in spirit instead of smugly condescending, and makes sure the Right as well as the Left gets a chance to say its piece.
To call a station "right-wing propaganda" that features notable liberal hosts and commentators like Alan Colmes and Juan Williams and so many left-of-center guests-from real lefties, like Ted Rall, to centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman-in addition to some the most thoughtful right-of-center pundits and analysts in the country, is hard to credit. Too many of today's liberals, though, would prefer a world in which liberal positions were just assumed. Fox-and this is the second reason liberals hate it-forces the Left to explain itself, justify itself, and answer its critics. It was cozier for the Left in the television days when the Right didn't get to talk back.
The third reason the left hates Fox is indeed what I dub the "Fox effect": other stations and institutions are trying to match Fox's success by themselves including a right-of-center worldview. On cable, for instance, MSNBC now has Scarborough Country, while CNBC airs Dennis Miller's show, two programs with generally right-leaning hosts. Neither of these programs would be airing if not for Fox. Fox's market victory is forcing change, at least if other networks want to stay competitive.
Finally, Fox is a news station, with its own reporters and producers who don't all march to the liberal beat, which means it can report things as newsworthy-the UN oil-for-food scandal, the Swifties-that the mainstream media would just as soon ignore for political reasons.
PL: FOX is exploiting such an obvious niche in news. How could it have been left open so long?
BA: Surveys going back for decades have documented that nine out of ten journalists vote Democratic and that they tend to fall on the left-wing side of the party in their views. Yet for decades-and here I'm painting with a broad brush, I recognize-the journalistic mind equated objectivity with its liberal worldview. I have a great quote from Dan Rather in the book: Liberal bias, he said, was "one of the great political myths...Most reporters don't know whether they're Republican or Democrat, and vote every which way." I think Rather probably believed that. Why wouldn't he? Everybody around him believed it. Sure, you had conservatives complaining about "the liberal media" in political life and in right-of-center magazines, most of them with small circulation, but they could be discounted. And there was little commercial pressure to see that something might be wrong-especially on the network news programs, which were run as prestige loss leaders.
What was necessary to burst this ideological bubble was competition-first from talk radio, then from Fox News, and now with the Internet, all of which offer reporting and analysis and ideas that the culture of mainstream media journalism deemed unworthy of consideration, beyond the pale, yet which have won huge and profitable audiences. And you needed both technological advances and regulatory changes to allow this breathtaking proliferation of information sources to occur.
In South Park Conservatives, I discuss a visionary speech given by Rupert Murdoch at the Manhattan Institute back in the late eighties predicting the opening of the media mind simply because of the increase of channels made possible by cable. Someone, he said-and it turned out to be him on television-was going to find a way to connect with the millions of Americans who found traditional news outlets too out of touch with their concerns and too contemptuous of their values. I believe the same opportunity is available on the entertainment front as well, though as of yet it has only begun to be exploited.
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