An alternative view: "THE ILLIBERAL MEDIA"
Here is an article from Z-Magazine, challenging the stereotype (or myth, if you prefer) of the media as being dominated by liberals. Although the author's personal political views are often to the left of my own, and although I do not care for his tone of High Dudgeon, I think he makes some very telling points. Besides, it is always a good idea to challenge stereotypes (IMO).
Since the article's URL is the same as Z-Net's home page (odd!), I am reproducing it in full:
THE ILLIBERAL MEDIA
Edward S. Herman
Claims of a pervasive "liberal" or "left" media bias are heard repeatedly in the allegedly liberal/left media, but counterclaims of
exceptional "illiberal" or "conservative" bias and power in the media are exceedingly rare. This is hardly a reflection of reality: there is
a huge right-wing Christian radio and TV system; the right-wing Rupert Murdoch owns a TV network, movie studio, 132 newspapers,
book publishers (including HarperCollins), and 25 magazines, among other holdings; Rush Limbaugh admirer John Malone's
Tele-Communications Inc. is the largest cable system in the United States (14 million subscribers) and has interests in 91 U.S.
cable content services; the editorial page of the largest circulation national newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, is aggressively
reactionary; the talk show world on radio and TV is dominated by the likes of Robert Novak (CrossFire), the McLaughlin Group, and
Rush Limbaugh and Limbaugh clones; and even PBS is saturated with right-wing regulars (Buckley, Brown, McLaughlin,
Wattenberg).
The Pitiful Giant Syndrome
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) recently listed 52 national media figures of the right, from Roger Ailes to Walter
Williams, most of whom have proclaimed the media's liberal bias while occupying positions of access and power vastly more
extensive than liberals could ever hope to attain. And leftists are an extinct species in the mainstream media; the firing of Jim
Hightower by ABC, immediately following the Disney acquisition, was like the passing of the last carrier pigeon, or dodo bird. This
doesn't prevent the pundits, and even the media moguls, from making bitter complaints about the power of the "left." Rupert Murdoch
and John Malone vowed a year ago that they were jointly planning a news channel in order to combat the "left bias" of the media.
The right-wing Canadian mogul Conrad Black, who owns more than half the daily newspapers in Canada and over a hundred in this
country (including the Chicago Sun Times) is also constantly whining about the liberal-left bias of the press.
The reason we only hear plaints of a "liberal" media is that the right-wing is so well entrenched and aggressive that its members can
pretend that their own potent selves don't exist when they speak of media bias. Just as power allowed the right-wing and a complicit
"liberal media" to label university dissidents a PC threat, while ignoring the massive right-wing attempt to impose its own political
agenda on the university, so in the case of the media, views disapproved by the powerful are "liberal" or "left"--the views of the
numerous right-wing moguls and pundits are implicitly unbiased or merely countering those of the omnipresent, subversive, but
elusive "liberals." We can call this the "pitiful giant syndrome," harking back to Nixon era claims that the poor USA was a pitiful
giant being pushed around by Third World upstarts. The pitiful moguls are of course in the supremely privileged position of being able
to create their own right-wing news and commentary operations and exclude those that don't meet their political standards. Murdoch
personally funded the new conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, and he has placed Roger Ailes in charge of his new cable
news services--Ailes is the Republican specialist in media dirty tactics (famous for his role in the Willie Horton ploy in 1988), who
came to the Murdoch news operation after a stint as Rush Limbaugh's producer. Malone recently created his own new
talk-commentary program, "Damn Right!," hosted by David Asman, the Wall Street Journal editorial page's noted apologist for state
terrorism in Central America, along with another "citizen education" show, "The Race for the Presidency," under partisan Republican
management. He has also welcomed to TCI cable Pat Robertson's Family Channel and the new, exclusively right-wing,
Empowerment Channel. At the same time, Malone succeeded in killing The 90s Channel, that rare (and now approaching the
extinct) entity called a "liberal" channel, by raising its entry rates to his cable system to prohibitive levels. The pitiful giant was
exercising raw economic power in pursuit of his political agenda, but the liberal media didn't notice or complain. (And the Clinton
FCC, while sanctioning one giant monopoly power enhancing merger after another, refused to intervene.)
Flabby Centrists versus Aggressive Right
In the real world, the resurgent power of corporate and financial interests, an increasingly concentrated media ever more closely
integrated with advertisers (now spending on the media over $75 billion a year), the proliferation of corporate-funded thinktanks and
the corporate "leasing the ivory tower," has shifted political power and media opinion sharply to the right. At this point, "left" in the
media is conservative, centrist, and in a defensive mode, accepting without question the premises of corporate capitalism and the
imperial state, but weakly supporting the preservation of an eroding welfare state. The strong liberalism of L. T. Hobhouse
(Liberalism), Louis Brandeis (The Curse of Bigness), and John Dewey (Reconstruction in Philosophy), with its powerful strain of
equalitarianism and opposition to concentrated economic power, is still deeply rooted in the public, but is hard to find in mainstream
politics or the media. The centrist-conservative media "left" is epitomized by David Broder, although Mark Shields, Roger Rosenblatt,
or Jack Germond would do just as well. In the late 1980s, when a Central America activist asked the editor of the Philadelphia
Inquirer to identify his left columnist who offset Charles Krauthammer and George Will, the editor answered: David Broder. But
Broder's views are pure establishment; he evades tough issues, joins almost every establishment crusade (NAFTA, Persian Gulf
war, Soviet Threat and military buildup, welfare and entitlements out of control), and devotes maximum attention to election
horse-racing. He also never fights for principles against strong establishment opposition-- thus, while disliking Reagan's Central
America wars, he simply abandoned the subject, giving the floor to Will, Krauthammer, and the administration. So Broder never
bothers anybody important, adapts beautifully to class and imperial warfare, and is the ideal liberal for an era of counterrevolution.
(For a fuller treatment, see my chapter on Broder in Triumph of the Market).
Meanwhile, the right-wing opposition to Broder and company--Will, Krauthammer, Robert Bartley, Fred Barnes, Mona Charren, the
Kristols, John Leo, and dozens more--are not conservatives, they are reactionary servants of the corporate community, which has
been on the offensive for over 20 years, striving to remove all obstacles to its growth and profitability. These obstacles include the
welfare state, regulation of corporate practices, and an organized labor movement. Removing these, and returning us to nineteenth
century socio-economic conditions, is not a "conservative" project, it is reactionary. So is the support of the "strong state" in the
Pinochet-Reagan-Thatcher modes, featuring ruthless law and order regimes, imperial aggressiveness, and military-industrial and
prison-industrial complexes riding high.
Right-wing Echo Chamber
With flabby centrists like Broder as the left, and even these in small numbers, the large array of aggressive right-wing pundits and
editors like Robert Bartley (Wall Street Journal) can engineer agendas. In order to fix agendas themes must be repeated, with
passion, to make them seem really important. The right wingers are sufficiently numerous to be able to constitute an "echo
chamber," in which the charges are repeated, each small elaboration used to keep the subject on the agenda, and the agenda
pushed relentlessly. They are able to elevate sleazy trash with a suitable message (Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access) into national
prominence and turn the relatively trivial "filegate" into the equivalent of Watergate (Jeff Cohen, "'Filegate Equals Watergate': The
Conservative Echo Chamber Circulates a Myth," EXTRA!, Oct. 1996). They can even make a genuine contribution to war hysteria
and the militarization of foreign policy, as in the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990-1991 (see Eric Alterman's Sound and Fury).
The spineless political and media liberals not only don't set agendas, they often get on the right-wing bandwagons themselves. They
quickly swallowed the line of a Sandinista threat, and in the phony MIG crisis of 1984 competed with one another in urging an
aggressive U.S. response. Liberal congressman Lee Hamilton was notorious for caving in during the Iran-contra investigation, in the
interest of a "national unity" that the right-wing regularly ignores in attacking their enemies. And David Broder followed Hamilton and
his fellow Democrats in failing to press the attack on North, Reagan and Bush despite their carrying out covert terrorist operations in
violation of law and constitutional principles. Clinton refused to pursue the Bush administration's involvement in the Banco Lavoro
case and indirect funding of Saddam Hussein, and the media liberals followed in his wake. The 1995 testimony by former Reagan
official Howard Teicher that the Reagan administration had "authorized, approved and assisted" delivery of cluster bombs to Iraq,
among other massive arms support, was of no interest to the liberal media.
The right-wing media maintained a ferocious attack on Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, whose work was vastly more relevant to
substantive issues than Kenneth Starr's inquiries into Whitewater. The liberal media, which failed to defend Walsh and give his
investigation major attention, have allowed the conservative echo chamber to elevate and honor Starr and the Whitewater
investigation (see Robert Parry's Fooling America, and his ongoing reports in his newsletter The Consortium). Iraqgate is "ancient
history" for the media; the more aged Whitewater for some reason retains currency.
While the right-wing echo chamber has been important in pushing numerous nasty policy trends, it should be recognized that this
echo chamber is underwritten by big money and would not work without "liberal media" cooperation. The McLaughlin Group is
funded by General Electric, many of the other right wingers are or have been supported at corporate funded thinktanks, and a
majority of them are carried as columnists by the liberal media. The liberal media have also regularly joined in right-wing propaganda
campaigns- -Newsweek and the New York Times were major participants in the PC propaganda wave; they all gave prominence to
The Bell Curve, and supported the Reaganite arms race and wars of the 1980s; and they are virtually all now in the Concord
Coalition camp elevating the threat of entitlement costs into a crisis and setting the stage for the further erosion of the welfare state.
Proving Liberal Domination
Just as money and power allow the dominant illiberals to call the media liberal and left, so money and power allow them to study
and "prove" media bias. S. Robert Lichter, Linda Lichter, and Stanley Rothman have been the most prominent rightists who have
engaged in this "scientific" effort. The Lichters organized their Center for Media and Public Affairs in 1985, with accolades from
Reagan and Pat Buchanan; Rothman has an Olin chair at Smith College. In a 1981 article on "Media and Business Elites" (Public
Opinion), Robert Lichter and Rothman (LR) tried to prove the liberal bias of the media by showing that the "media elite" votes
Democratic and has opinions more liberal than that of mainstream America.
The LR study violated every scientific standard you could name. They claimed to be studying a "media elite," but actually sampled
media personnel who had anything to do with media "content," so most of them may be ordinary reporters (they failed to disclose
the composition of their sample). LR compared their "media elite" with a sample of middle and upper levels of corporate
management, not with comparable professionals like teachers, let alone non- professional "middle Americans." Their questions were
ambiguous and loaded (for a good analysis, see Herbert Gans, "Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?," Columbia Journalism
Review, Nov.-Dec. 1985), making one wonder why anyone would participate in this survey. And in fact, Ben Bradlee, the top editor of the Washington Post--one of the papers allegedly sampled by LR--claimed that he couldn't locate a single employee who had
participated in the LR survey.
One key technique of right-wing proofs of liberal bias is to focus on social issues, as the affluent and urban media journalists and
editors do tend to be more liberal than blue collar workers on issues like abortion-choice, gay rights, and the handling of drug
problems, as are urban professionals across the board. On the other hand, on matters like government regulation, distrust of big
business, income distribution, and jobs policies, "middle America" is to the left of the business and media elite. Rightwingers like
LR handle this by bypassing the problematic areas and focusing on social issues, where they can score points.
Right-wing proofs of a liberal media also focus on voting patterns. The 1981 LR piece featured the pro-Democrat voting records of the
media elite in the four elections between 1964 and 1976. In April 1996 a similar finding was published by the Roper Center and
Gannett Freedom Forum; 89% of a sample of 139 Washington journalists allegedly voted for Clinton in 1992. The inference quickly
drawn from this, as from the LR study, was that the media has a liberal bias. But the true media elite is the owners, who have legal
control of the media companies, can hire, promote and fire their employees, and can shape policy a la Malone and Murdoch. LR and
their allies never poll owners.
There are other questions to be asked in regard to these conservative polls. Why don't they compare the media elite's views on
NAFTA with the views of middle America? How can we explain the mainstream media's failure to focus on the declining economic
position and insecurity of middle Americans as an election issue? How can we explain the fact that a majority of newspapers came
out editorially for Bob Dole with the "liberals" controlling the media? How can we explain the steady attacks on Clinton's character
and focus on Whitewater, and more cursory treatment of Iran-contra and the Banco Lavoro case, in terms of a pro-Democrat bias? In
what sense is Clinton a "liberal" anyway?
These and other questions can be answered by media analyses that focus on the control, funding, structure, and performance of the
media, rather than reporter opinions and voting patterns. For example, the "propaganda model," which Noam Chomsky and I spelled
out in Manufacturing Consent, describes the working of the mainstream media in terms of underlying structural factors and "filters"
that define the parameters within which media underlings work. These constraints and filters include ownership and the financial
pressures for bottom line performance; the need to adapt to the interests of advertisers, who pay the media bills; sourcing
processes which cause journalists to depend heavily on government and business newsmakers; the threat of flak, which keeps the
journalists under pressure and in line; and anticommunist and market-supportive premises that journalists internalize. The right-wing
pundits and their echo chamber fit into this model quite nicely, which is why General Electric and the advertising community give
them generous support.
It should be noted that FAIR, in its bimonthly publication EXTRA!, has provided numerous studies with compelling evidence of
conservative domination of talk shows and public broadcasting. With the exception of their study of the huge bias in the selection of
guests on Nightline, their efforts have been given much less attention in the mainstream media than right-wing "proofs" of liberal
media bias as pronounced by Lichter and Rothman and the recent Roper--Gannett study. This is a reflection of genuine media bias,
with the right-wing network always able to push congenial findings into the echo chamber, giving themselves and their principals a
boost. But this publicity and neglect of the superior FAIR offerings are living proof that the claim of "liberal bias" is a lie and that the reality is one of illiberal domination.
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