The (Really) Conservative
Media
excerpted from the book
What Liberal Media?
The Truth About Bias and
the News
by Eric Alterman
Basic Books, 2003, paper
p225
One reason that many people including
some liberals, believe the myth of the liberal media is that they
do not know how extensive and influential the conservative media
is. It is not simply that when you add up the circulation/penetration
of the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal editorial page,
the New York Post, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, National
Review, American Spectator, Human Events, wvvw.andrewsullivan.com,
the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, the entire universe of talk
radio, and most of the punditocracy, you've got a fair share of
the media. The ability of these deeply biased and frequently untrustworthy
outlets to shape the universe of the so-called "liberal media"
gives them a degree of power and influence that exceeds their
already considerable circulations.
p225
When Washington Post White House reporter John Harris noted that
he and his fellow White House correspondents were proving far
more sympathetic to the conservative George W. Bush than they
had ever been to the "liberal" Bill Clinton, he chose
as his main culprit "conservative interest groups, commentators
and congressional investigators" who, beginning in 1993,
"waged a remorseless campaign that they hoped would make
life miserable for Clinton and vault themselves to power."
This movement had been in the works for decades and had helped
turn the tide in Washington toward conservatism as early as 1978,
when Jimmy Carter was forced to switch directions in mid-presidency
and embrace a host of measures that he had previously found to
be anathema. But during the previous decade and a half, conservative
interest groups had grown both more powerful and more conservative,
outpacing liberals at first and soon matching and eventually exceeding
in many cases the resources of the old establishment. Liberals
have no such movement, not a fraction of the money, and what troops
they possess can boast much less organizational discipline than
that enjoyed by the right.
p226
Franklin Foer of the not-so-liberal New Republic shares Harris's
basic analysis of an objectively pro-conservative Republican Washington
media, but believes that reporters let themselves and their colleagues
off the hook too easily by blaming outside pressure groups. The
problem, as Foer diagnoses it, is that after years of listening
to conservatives complain about their bias, and years of living
in fear of overzealous media critics, liberal reporters have been
completely cowed." Of course the two hypotheses are not exactly
contradictory. Conservatives have spent billions during the past
three decades, both to pressure the mainstream media to move rightward
and to create their own parallel media structure, which serves
the same purpose as it provides an alternative viewpoint both
to the faithful and the gullible. Unbeknownst to millions of Americans
who continue to believe that the media are genuinely liberal-or
that conservatives and liberals are engaged in a fair fight of
relative equality-liberals are fighting a near-hopeless battle
in which they are enormously outmatched by most measures. Just
take a look, for example, at the power and influence exercised
within the media by the self-described "wild men" of
the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
For twenty-nine years before he stepped
down in 2001 to become a columnist for the paper, Robert Bartley
led his Journal editorial page staff in the practice of a kind
of journalism alien to most newspapers and newsmagazines. It was
not typical editorial page opinion-mongering. It was not the objective
style of reporting to which all national newspapers, including
the Wall Street Journal, aspire. It was something else entirely;
a reported polemic, written in a style akin to a Sunday sermon
on hellfire and damnation, or perhaps a politically inverted Alexander
Cockburn column. Michael Kinsley, a former columnist for the page,
calls the page's methods "Stalinist" and couched in
"intellectual dishonesty." Alex Jones, head of the Shorenstein
Center at Harvard, termed Bartley's pages "perhaps the most
influential, most articulate, most ferocious opinion page in the
country." Its power, New Yorker editor David Remnick noted,
is "amplified by the audience it reaches every day-five and
a half million of the nation's best educated and most influential
citizens." In January 2002, the Journal added the viewers
of CNBC to its Dow Jones-powered global reach, as that station
inexplicably chose the editors to present a weekly version of
the extremist opinion-mongering it offers in print on a daily
basis, with no balance from a single moderate, much less an actual
liberal. Given this influence, it seems likely that if you added
up every genuinely liberal voice in the American political discourse-every
single newspaper pundit, talk-show co-host, opinion magazine columnist
or writer, and Internet scribbler-you would not have accumulated
even one half of the power enjoyed on a daily basis by the Journal's
firebreathing staff.
Under the curiously soft-spoken Bartley's
direction, the Journal's editorial pages did more than make American
journalistic history; they made political and economic history
too. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the economic historian
Wayne Parsons observed, "without [the Journal's] support
it is difficult to see how the supply-side argument could possibly
have achieved such a leading position in the economic policy debates."
The amazing story of the Journal's near single-handed promotion
of a theory from economic outer space-one that lacked a single
well-known and respected proponent in the economic profession
at the time of its adoption by candidate and then President Ronald
Reagan, has been told many times. When, after twelve years in
which supply-side-inspired deficits threatened to strangle future
growth, Bill Clinton was forced to clean up the economic mess,
Bartley had no doubt about what would happen. Clinton's proposals,
he predicted, would "cripple" the economy. When the
plan passed, the paper promised, "[W]e are seeing the early
signs of the stagflation that we knew so well during the Carter
presidency." "Hysteria" would not be too strong
a term to describe the Journal's reaction to the Clinton plan.
The headline, "The Class Warfare Economy" was attended
by a cartoon of a guillotine. The tiny rise in the nation's top
marginal tax rates to a level where they remained the second lowest
in the industrialized world did not turn out well for the editors.
The Clinton years resulted in an unbroken expansion of the economy
in which the vast majority of its benefits were tilted toward
the very wealthy, the people on whom "class war" had
allegedly been declared.
The Journal editors are so deeply committed
to the far-right propaganda they espouse, they frequently contradict
the reporting in their own newspaper. For instance, in 1980 a
Journal reporter broke a story proving that an alleged $100 million
administration cost offered up by a group of California oil firms
protesting a new state tax, was, in fact, a wildly exaggerated
estimate of the expense of administering the tax. Two days later,
the editorial page noted, "according to one estimate, enforcement
of the tax would cost taxpayers $100 million...." Four years
later, Washington bureau reporter David Rogers discovered that
the CIA had been illegally mining Nicaragua's harbors. The story
ran on page six and was picked up by the Washington Post. Six
days afterwards, the editorial page, standing foursquare behind
the contra war, criticized members of Congress for leaking the
information to the Post. More recently, the paper's reporters
won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the misleading statements of
tobacco company officials, leading to massive jury awards in tobacco
liability cases. Meanwhile, Bartley and company ridiculed tobacco
regulations as "further government-imposed nuisances, whose
chief direct effect will be to make millionaires of a few more
lawyers."
In August 2002, Bartley wrote a column
in favor of war with Iraq in which he insisted that because the
Bush administration had succeeded "for the first time exerting
American leadership to unify the factions opposing Saddam."
In uniting the Iraqi opposition, "The pieces are now in place
to liberate Iraq." A day later, the Journal ran a heavily
reported page one story that popped Barley's hot air balloon.
"The tension among Iraq's opposition groups amounts to a
significant impediment as the Bush administration speaks more
publicly about ousting Mr. Hussein," the Journal reporters
explained, offering the kind of evidence entirely absent from
his op-ed. Readers of only the editorial page might have been
surprised, a day later, to discover that the most powerful Kurdish
chieftain in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani, had refused the Bush
administration's invitation to attend its meeting. But one suspects
the paper's readership among America's titans of industry are
well aware as to which portions of the paper to trust when real
money is on the line.
When it comes to the editors' ideological
opponents, all gloves come off and most journalistic rulebooks
go out the window. During the 1984 election, for instance, the
WSJ editorial pages ran a story rejected by the newspaper about
alleged connections between Geraldine Ferraro and the Mafia, based
on her husband's business dealings. In the following election,
it published rumors about Democrat Michael Dukakis's psychological
state that originated with known nut-case Lyndon LaRouche and
dealt mainly with Dukakis's brother.
Journal editors like to paint the media
as soft on Communism, though the only credible example to which
they can easily point is Rupert Murdoch's defense of China. (See
below.) And while, to its credit, the Journal has been tough on
Murdoch, its contributors have also been genuinely soft on fascism.
The brutal Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, they argued, "saved
his country," transforming it from "a Communist beachhead
to an example of free-market reform." That the so-called
"Communist beachhead" was actually a democratically
elected government, the editors do not mention. Former editor
Jude Wanniski termed the death-squad leader and priest killer,
Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador to be the victim of a "McCarthyist"
media cabal and "one of the most successful propaganda hoaxes
of the decade." (Wanniski has also developed a decidedly
soft Spot for another would-be fascist, Louis Farrakhan, and serves
as perhaps his most high-profile champion in America.) It's not
easy, in the eyes of the editors, for any right-winger to go too
far. But when it happens, it usually turns out to be the fault
of leftists. For instance, when, in 1993, a right-wing terrorist
murdered an abortion doctor named David Gunn in Pensacola, Fla.,
the editors blamed . . . the Sixties' New Left: "We think
it is possible to identify the date when the United States . .
. began to tip off the emotional tracks," they explained.
"The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention
found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam
War movement." The protesters, they went on, were responsible
for "lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal
conduct." In other words, Jerry Rubin made me do it. Again,
if, for the sake of balance, the Dow Jones corporation and CNBC
wished to balance their politics with the equivalently extreme
views from the left, they would have a hard time finding anyone
at all in the United States, save perhaps Alexander Cockburn,
who by sheer coincidence, no doubt, is also a former Wall Street
Journal editorial page columnist.
The Journal editors, moreover, play by
journalistic rules of their own making. In a lengthy examination
in the Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman examined six
dozen examples of disputed editorials and op-eds in the paper.
She discovered that "on subjects ranging from lawyers, judges,
and product liability suits to campus and social issues, a strong
America, and of course, economics, we found a consistent pattern
of incorrect facts, ignored or incomplete facts, missing facts,
uncorroborated facts." In many of these cases, the editors
refused to print a correction, preferring to allow the aggrieved
party to write a letter to the editor, which would be printed
much later, and then let the reader decide whose version appeared
more credible. Almost never is the record corrected or do the
editors admit their errors.
The page's cavalier attitude toward facts
and corrections is matched by an impressive ferocity of language.
Frequently, its content is closer to a Rush Limbaugh radio rant
or an Ann Coulter outburst than the Olympian tone employed by
editorial writers on Fifteenth Street or in Times Square. Citizens
who support consumer and safety regulation are termed "no-growth
specialists, the safety and health fascists who try to turn real
and imagined hazards to some political end." One editorial
even referred to "so-called acid rain." To Journal editorial
writers, the rest of the media-including presumably the paper's
own reporting staff-is not merely liberal, but, as Mark Helprin
wrote in its pages, "slavish[ly] obedien[t]" to Democratic
liberals. This has, he insisted, "quintupled the arrogance
of the most arrogant people in America, a triumphalist coterie
of graduate students who accord to the hard left the same uneasy
respect that most people reserve for the clergy, and grow teary-eyed
over bats, squirrels and caribou as with barely concealable pleasure
they sacrifice whole regions of rednecks."
Aside from the Chicken Little-like role
vis-a-vis the Clinton economic plan, the primary task the paper
set for itself during the 1 990s was the responsibility for publishing
virtually every anti-Clinton rumor ever started, no matter how
farfetched or lightly sourced. When White House aide Vincent Foster
committed suicide in a park outside Washington in 1993, he left
a note saying "the WSJ editors lie without consequence."
(The Journal had been insinuating nefarious activity on Foster's
part.)
Politically, having the imprimatur of
the Journal and its first-rate reporting staff gives its editorial
pages far greater credibility and significance than they could
possibly have achieved by mere force of argument. Many of the
arguments made on its pages would be permanently relegated to
the extreme fringes of political debate were it not for their
appearance in one of the world's greatest newspapers. Nevertheless
it was the Journal's embrace of these strange tales that helped
keep conservative hopes alive long enough for Kenneth Starr's
investigation to find something-or anything-with which to impeach
Bill Clinton.
The strange pursuit of poor Vince Foster,
in death as in life, is a case in point. While it is obviously
a bit unfair to blame the Journal writers for Foster's suicide-
though he may have-their journalistic values with regard to his
case left a great deal to be desired. "Until the Foster death
is seriously studied, a Banquo's ghost will stalk . . . the Clinton
administration," one long editorial warned, paying particular
attention to Mrs. Clinton's movement on the day of Foster's death,
as if to cast her as a contemporary Lady MacBeth. The Journal
also praised other media outlets' outlandish pursuits with regard
to this paranoid endeavor. Its assistant features editor, Erich
Eichman, later books editor, expressed "a debt of gratitude"
for the New York Post's irresponsible speculation that Foster's
gun had been put in his hand after his death and the body had
been moved to the spot where it was found. Two days afterward,
the editors imagined a vicious physical attack on a reporter whose
notes were allegedly stolen, no doubt to prevent the disclosure
of some other dastardly deed. This piece was entitled "Censored
in Arkansas" and argued that Harper reporter L. J. Davis
had met with foul play while reporting a story on Whitewater in
Little Rock. But the Journal editors turned out to have played
fast and loose with the facts, once again, though the facts themselves
are quite confusing. Davis lost some pages of his notes after
waking up unconscious in his hotel room. He told a reporter he
did not remember much beyond that and admitted to having downed
at least four martinis on the night in question. But the hotel
manager later explained, "We have records that he was down
here [at the hotel bar] at 10:30 that night," which was supposed
to be the end of when he said he had been unconscious. The hotel
bartender confirmed the manager's version and put the number of
martinis Davis consumed at six. Davis, meanwhile, quite understandably,
never mentioned the incident in print, thinking it insignificant
and not trusting his own memory. He says he asked the Journal
to print a retraction of its wild allegations, but of course it
refused.
The Foster "murder" may have
disappointed, but two months later, the paper went back to the
paranoid well, this time on behalf of the infamous Jerry Falwell
videotape, "The Clinton Chronicles," in which Clinton
was blamed for Foster's murder, Davis's alleged assault, and even
a mob-related killing during his Arkansas governorship. While
the paper pretended to disassociate itself from the film's nuttiest
charges- 'finding no real evidence of a Clinton connection, and
feeling the President of the United States is entitled to a presumption
of innocence, we decline in the name of responsibility to print
what we've heard"-it still felt compelled to print the 800
phone number so that its readers might obtain their own copy.
One of the prime movers of the Journal's
anti-Clinton obsession was John Fund, who spent a great deal of
time meeting with members of the Arkansas Project and some of
the more notorious figures in the Paula Jones lawsuit and "Get-Clinton"
conspiracy. Fund acted as kind of a father figure to many of them,
helping to guide their strategy in secret while simultaneously
writing editorials in the Journal accusing Clinton of all manner
of unproven malfeasance. It was a complicated balancing act it
could not last. In a tale that appears almost too weird to write
down, it seems that a woman named Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, with
whom Fund had had an affair more than twenty years ago, sent her
young daughter, Morgan, to look up Fund when she went to New York.
One thing led to another, and the results appear to have been
a live-in relationship and an abortion.
Anyway, Fund's relationship with the daughter
of his ex-girlfriend did not exactly work out, inspiring mother
and daughter to take their revenge by uploading onto the Web a
taped telephone call in which John attempts to reconcile his support
for Morgan's abortion with his "family values" politics.
Mrs. Foster then informed the media that John and Morgan had decided
to wed after all. This turned out to be false, but the next thing
you know, Fund was gone from the Journal's editorial page and
was apparently the victim of a series of bizarre but quite public
campaigns designed to destroy his reputation-up to and including
an arrest (with charges later dropped) for battery that included
a restraining order. (Irony of ironies, the Rush Limbaugh ghostwriter
is also cited in David Brock's book, among other places, as a
likely source for Matt Drudge's false and malicious claim that
Sidney Blumenthal was a wife-beater, though Fund denies this.)
Fund denies the charges and, in the view of this writer, is almost
certainly innocent. (I have always found him to be very much a
gentleman in his personal dealings.) Still, the charges demonstrate
the difficulties that so many conservatives face-the pot-smoking,
draft-dodging, multiply adulterous, deadbeat dad named Newt Gingrich;
Henry Hyde, who broke up another man's family at age 40 in his
"youthful" adulterous fling; adulterers Robert Dole
and Robert Livingston; to say nothing of men of the cloth such
as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart-who seek to enforce their hypocritical
moralistic standards on the rest of us as they ignore them. The
fact that the media take these people seriously, while knowing
of the hypocrisies that lie beneath their charges-is further evidence
of the foolish fiction that promotes the SCLM myth.
p245
The notion of a conservative network capable of enforcing such
a line on its members, drawing the mainstream media into its ideological
corner, and mau-mauing even many liberals into parroting its line
might be just a pipe dream today were it not for the generosity
of one man. As of September 2002, sixty-nine-year-old Richard
Mellon Scaife was, according to Forbes, the 209th richest person
in America, with a personal fortune of just over a billion dollars.
On a list of the strangest people in America, he might rank a
bit higher. Had Scaife decided to commit his fortune to chasing
orchids or beautifying his native corner of western Pennsylvania
while writing the occasional six-figure check to the Republican
Party, he would merely qualify as one more eccentric conservative
billionaire. Instead Scaife put his fortune at the service of
a group of visionary right-wing intellectuals and activists. His
efforts proved so successful that it is not too much to say that
the United States is a different country because of them.
p247
Scaife's great-grandfather Thomas Mellon founded the financial
empire that bears his name. Mellon mused in 1885, "The normal
condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation;
as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of such
exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in both body
and mind." He would appear to be a prophet of sorts about
his own family. Richard Mellon Scaife was raised by his mother,
a "gutter drunk," according to her daughter Cordelia,
and an ineffectual father in a family that excelled, in Scaife's
sister's words, only in "making each other totally miserable."
Richard grew up around Pittsburgh surrounded
by buildings and institutions named either "Mellon"
or "Scaife" or both. An important building at the University
of Pittsburgh, where Scaife studied, is called Scaife Hall. Another
university in town also has a Scaife Hall. Its name is Carnegie
Mellon. Scaife's uncle, R. K. Mellon proved adept at expanding
the family fortune in the years after World War Two, but he thought
little of his brother-in-law, Alan Scaife, and would not allow
him near any important aspects of the business. As Richard Scaife
would later put it, "My father was sucking hind tit."
A failure in his own business ventures, Alan Scaife died a year
after his son's graduation from college, and his son sold his
corporation "for a dollar." In 1974, Scaife expressed
some of his feelings about his family when he donated a new wing
to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in honor of his mother. While
she had always considered herself to be "Sarah Mellon Scaife,"
he insisted that the new structure be named the "Sarah Scaife"
wing. Shortly thereafter, he also had the name "Mellon"
removed from the foundation that bore his mother's name.
Like his father, Richard Scaife was refused
any substantive responsibilities in the family business by his
uncle. He had been thrown out of Yale University in an alcohol-fueled
incident in which he rolled a beer keg down a stairwell that broke
both of a fellow student's legs and nearly left him crippled for
life. Scaife managed to make it through the University of Pittsburgh,
but one suspects this achievement was not unrelated to the presence
of his father in the chairman's seat of the university's board
of directors. Richard Scaife spent much of the years that followed
as a mean drunk without any visible career or profession. According
to Mellon family biographer, Burton Hersh, Scaife nearly drank
himself to death, time and again.
Due to the U.S. tax law, Scaife was forced
to become a philanthropist to protect his share of the family's
wealth, lest large parts of it went to the IRS. In 1957, when
Fortune magazine tried to rank the largest fortunes in America,
four Mellons- including Richard's mother-were among the top eight
Sarah Scaife and, after her death in 1965, Richard Scaife, earned
huge tax deductions from their trusts and foundations. Sarah Scaife's
causes focused on family planning, the poor and disabled, hospitals,
the environment, and various good works in and around Pittsburgh.
Her most famous gift went to the University of Pittsburgh research
laboratory during the late 1940s, when Jonas Salk happened to
be there working on the formula for his successful polio vaccine.
Richard Scaife would not help cure polio, but he would, eventually,
help impeach a president.
Scaife's first donations to conservative
groups began in 1962 with relatively meager grants to the American
Bar Association's Fund for Public Education for "education
against communism," and shortly thereafter, to the Hoover
Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
and the American Enterprise Institute. But 1964 proved to be a
kind of rude political awakening for Scaife. An enthusiastic Goldwater
supporter, that summer he ferried the candidate on his private
plane to the annual Bohemian Grove retreat, where wealthy businessmen
and male political leaders frolic together in the Northern Californian
woods, happily peeing on plants. Scaife was extremely excited
about the possibilities of a Goldwater presidency, and he may
have let his hopes triumph over his ability to judge the likely
course of events. Few people were surprised in November of that
year when Johnson trounced the conservative Republican. Most pundits
blamed the candidate's conservative views and connections to the
conservative movement as the cause. The New York Times's James
Reston wrote that Goldwater's conservatism "has wrecked his
party for a long time to come." Also at the Times, Tom Wicker
wrote that conservatives "cannot win in this era of American
history." The Los Angeles Times interpreted the election
outcome to mean that if Republicans continued to hew to the conservative
line, "they will remain a minority party indefinitely."
Political scientists Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky speculated
that if the Republicans nominated a conservative again he would
lose so badly "we can expect an end to a competitive two-party
system."
According to one of Scaife's associates,
the billionaire became convinced that politically, no genuinely
conservative candidate could succeed in a nationwide election
without first overcoming the advantage that liberalism appeared
to have both in the media and in the war of political ideas that
provided politicians their ideological foundation.
p249
Most histories associate the founding of the Heritage Foundation
with the fortune of the conservative beer magnate, Joseph Coors.
This is because Coors put up the original $250,000 in seed money
in 1973. Inside of two years, however, Scaife's gifts had dwarfed
those of Coors, totaling more than $35 million in inflation-adjusted
dollars. At Heritage the joke went, "Coors gives six-packs;
Scaife gives cases." In 1976, Heritage's third year of operation,
Scaife ponied up over 40 percent of the foundation's total income
of $1,008,557. This proved "absolutely critical" to
the organization's survival, according to its president, Edwin
J. Feulner.
But Heritage represents just a small fraction
of Scaife's giving during the past three decades. At least five
additional organizations-the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution
and Peace at Stanford University, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation,
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research-received
in excess of ten million dollars from -Scaife's foundations between
1974 and 1998. And even these together represent barely a quarter
of the funds he disbursed to right-wing causes during this period.
Many of Scaife's most successful gifts
have been directed towards shaping the long-term contours of intellectual
and political thought, both within academia and outside of it.
Since 1970, Scaife put up more than $8 million to fund scholars
working on "law and economics" at places like the University
of Chicago, the University of Miami, and George Mason University
Law School. Legal scholars who identify intellectually with this
movement have labored hard to redirect the emphasis in legal education
and jurisprudence toward the efficiency of the market rather than
the rights of the worker or consumer. Using Scaife money, these
well-funded programs have invited hundreds of federal judges to
attend seminars in luxurious vacation resorts in exchange for
their participation in seminars on issues such as the efficacy
of market solutions to problems such as the destruction of the
environment or unsafe working conditions for workers. Law and
economics scholarship has grown so mainstream that one of its
founders, Richard Posner, was named as the mediator on the single
largest anti-trust case of the past two decades-the United States
versus Microsoft- without a word of criticism in the media.
Scaife money was also instrumental in
sustaining the Federalist Society, an organization that has developed
into perhaps the most influential legal organization in America
after the American Bar Association, and among the most conservative.
Founded in 1982, the Federalists have received more than $1.3
million from Scaife' foundations since 1984. Today its membership
exceeds 25,000. The society's proponents can frequently be found
attacking liberal "judicial activism" while praising
the allegedly "strict constructionist" judges who interpret
the Constitution according to the founders' "original intent."
But as Chris Mooney pointed out, the society's understanding of
"original intent" is original indeed. While its name
invokes the authors of the Federalist Papers, James Madison, Alexander
Hamilton, and John Jay, its philosophy is more consistent with
the view of these writers' opponents, the AntiFederalists, who
sought to defeat the Constitution. In other words, scholars have
begun to interpret the Constitution based on the views of its
opponents 86
Within its ranks, the society includes
some of the most influential judges in America, including an extremely
high percentage of those selected by George W. Bush for promotion
to the federal bench. This is no surprise, since the advisers
selecting the judges and making the recommendation to President
Bush are either members of, or closely tied to, the society as
well. So, in late 2002, were four of nine members of the Supreme
Court, though it is hard to be certain, as the society refuses
to confirm or deny anyone's membership. During the Clinton impeachment
hearings, virtually every member of Kenneth Starr's prosecutorial
staff had some connection to the society. So did a number of the
lawyers who worked on the Paula Jones lawsuit 87 At the 2002 twentieth-anniversary
meeting of the society, the "Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture"-in
honor of the anti-Clinton radical activist and author who was
married to Theodore Olson and died when her plane crashed on September
11-was delivered by none other than Kenneth Starr.
Since 1996, the society has published
ABA Watch, documenting the American Bar Association's allegedly
liberal stands on abortion, the death penalty, and gun control.
President Bush was acting upon this legacy of criticism when he
chose to eliminate the ABA's influence in the judicial selection
process. As an only slightly tongue-in-cheek Grover Norquist told
Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post, "If Hillary Clinton
had wanted to put some meat on her charge of a 'vast right-wing
conspiracy,' she should have had a list of Federalist Society
members and she could have spun a more convincing story."
Scaife has also taken a considerable interest
in the media on America's college campuses. According to the Washington
Post's audit, Scaife's trusts and foundations have given at least
$146 million to university programs, equal to more than $373 million
in inflation-adjusted dollars. One of the chief beneficiaries
has been the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded in 1953
with William F. Buckley Jr. as its first president. Through an
organization called the Collegiate Network, ISI pays nearly all
the costs of conservative publications on sixty campuses and offers
graduate fellowships for the academically inclined. Former fellows
include Antonin Scalia, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., Dinesh D'Souza,
and William Kristol.
The conservative faculty organization
the National Association of Scholars benefited from Scaife's generosity
to the tune of over $2.6 million between 1988 and 1998. With an
advisory board featuring Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and
Chester Finn, the organization presents itself as a champion of
"intellectual renewal" and "academic standards"
in the face of their perceived deadline at the hands of leftist
academics and fashionable post-modern theories that blur the verities
of our time behind a facade of impenetrable professional vernacular.
The organization is more than willing, however, to play hardball
politics at the campuses where it operates, particularly in the
area of affirmative action, which it opposes most vehemently.
Of all of Scaife's political passions,
however, the one that appears most inspirational to him is his
view that the liberals who allegedly control the media are in
league with the liberals who control the Democratic Party to commit
all manner of malfeasance against law-abiding Americans, including
murder, extortion, kidnapping, drug smuggling, and money-laundering.
To this end Scaife has committed a sizable portion of his vast
fortune to various organizations that profess to be able either
to shed light on these forces, or even better, do battle with
them. For years these gifts appeared to take a rather haphazard
pattern. Scaife funded Gen. William C. Westmoreland's failed 1982
libel suit against CBS News. Beginning in 1977 he provided roughly
$2 million to Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, a right-wing press
critic, whose critiques of the alleged liberal bias in the media
have led some to observe that "Accuracy in Media" bears
the same relationship to accuracy in media that the Holy Roman
Empire bore to holiness, Rome, and empires. (Back in 1978, Ben
Bradlee famously termed Irvine "a miserable, carping, retromingent
vigilante.") Like Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, David
Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and other
miserable, carping, retromingent vigilantes to whom Scaife has
handed millions, Accuracy in Media's constant stream of propaganda,
faithfully broadcast by the media it attacks, is a major reason
that so many people inside and outside of the media share the
misimpression of its "liberalism."
Scaife also supported the Public Interest
and the National Interest, both of which are published under the
aegis of neoconservative impresario Irving Kristol. The cranky
neocon art critic, Hilton Kramer, got to edit the New Criterion,
a cultural review. Scaife also provided necessary funds for Reason,
the official publication of the libertarian Reason Foundation,
and Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee,
edited for decades by the excitable neocon, Norman Podhoretz.
Scaife also gave generously to Encounter magazine, before it folded,
which had been the house organ of the CIA during the days of the
intellectual battles over the Cold War in Europe in the 1950s
and 1960s. Overall, these publications have enjoyed spending more
than $10 million of Scaife's inheritance. Scaife money also helped
fund television documentaries on the economics of Milton Friedman,
the guru of the monetarist school of free-market economics, and
on Cold War themes. Suffice to say, none of these causes ever
excited Scaife like the opportunity to "get" Bill Clinton,
and nothing so loosened his purse strings. Scaife attributed his
support for the project to his doubts that "the Washington
Post and other major newspapers would fully investigate the disturbing
scandals of the Clinton White House." He explained those
doubts: "I am not alone in feeling that the press has a bias
in favor of Democratic administrations." That is why, he
continued, "I provided some money to independent journalists
investigating these scandals."
p258
The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg
Like the American and other Western Communist
parties in their heyday, the American conservative movement has
created a kind of alternative intellectual and political universe-a
set of institutions parallel to and modeled on the institutions
of mainstream society (many of which the movement sees, or imagines,
as the organs of a disciplined Liberal Establishment) and dedicated
to the single purpose of advancing a predetermined political agenda.
There is a kind of Inner Movement, consisting of a few hundred
funders, senior organization leaders, lawyers, and prominent media
personalities (but only a handful of practicing politicians),
and an Outer Movement, consisting of a few thousand staff people,
grunt workers, and lower-level operatives of one kind or another.
The movement has its own newspapers (the Washington Times, the
New York Post, the Journal's editorial page), its own magazines
(Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, Commentary,
and many more), its own broadcasting operations (Fox News and
an array of national and local talk-radio programs and right-wing
Christian broadcast outlets), its own publishing houses (Regnery
and the Free Press, among others), its own quasiacademic research
institutions (the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise
Institute), and even its own Popular Front-the Republican Party,
important elements of which (the party's congressional and judicial
leadership, for example) the movement has successfully commandeered.
These closely linked organizations (the vanguard of the conservative
revolution, you might say) compose an entire social world with
its own rituals, celebrations, and anniversaries, within which
it is possible to live one's entire life. It is a world with its
own elaborate system of incentives and sanctions, through which
- as [David] Brock discovered - energetic conformity is rewarded
with honors and promotions while deviations from the movement
line, depending on their seriousness, are punished with anything
from mild social disapproval to outright excommunication.
p263
... for all the alleged public spiritedness inspired by September
11, the mass public has proven no more interested in serious news-much
less international news- on September 10, 2002, than it had been
a year earlier. This news comes as a grievous shock and disappointment
to many journalists, who interpreted the events of September 11
as an endorsement of the importance of their work to their compatriots.
But as Sarah Wildman noted in the New Republic, Americans' curiosity
about the world around them barely survived the holiday shopping
season. Initially, journalists J cheered to reports of "Once
Insular Americans Studying Up on the World," as the LA Times
announced in October 2001. The story would prove a triumph of
hope over experience. Americans were certainly claiming to be
more interested in world affairs. From September 11 through October,
according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press,
78 percent of Americans followed news of the attacks closely.
But it was not to be. According to a wide-ranging
study by Peyton Craighill and Michael Dimock, interest in terrorism
and fear of future terrorists attacks have "not necessarily
translated into broader public interest in news about local, national,
or international events.... Reported levels of reading, watching,
and listening to the news are not markedly different than in the
spring of 2000." The report found, "At best, a slightly
larger percentage of the public is expressing general interest
in international and national news, but there is no evidence its
appetite for international news extends much beyond terrorism
and the Middle East." In fact, 61 percent of Americans admitted
to tuning out foreign news unless a "major development"
occurs.
p265
People are not angels. Power requires watchdogs. Powerful people
will often abuse their authority if they believe that no one is
watching. That, in a nutshell, is why we need journalists. As
Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists
and a former curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University,
has explained, "a journalist is never more true to democracy-is
never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic-than
when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the
news of the day; questioning the actions of those in authority;
disclosing information the public needs but others wish secret
for self-interested purposes."
And yet the public demands nothing of
the media companies that serve it, save entertainment. The dilemma
for even the most conscientious journalistic enterprise is inescapable,
and 9/11 did nothing to undermine it. As the political scientist
Robert Entman lamented:
To become sophisticated citizens, Americans
would need high-quality, independent journalism; but news organizations,
to stay in business while producing such journalism, would need
an audience of sophisticated citizens.... Because most members
of the public know and care relatively little about government,
they neither seek nor understand high-quality political reporting
and analysis. With limited demand for first-rate journalism, most
news organizations cannot afford to supply ~ it, and because they
do not supply it, most Americans have no practical source of the
information necessary to become politically sophisticated. Yet
it would take an informed and interested citizenry to create enough
demand to support top-flight journalism. The nature of both demand
and supply cements interdependence and diminishes the press's
autonomy. On the demand side, news organizations have to respond
to public tastes. They cannot stay in business if they produce
a diverse assortment of richly textured ideas and information
that nobody sees. To become informed and hold government accountable,
the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive
yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes,
not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the
public demands."
p266
Many conservatives who attack the media for its alleged liberalism
do so because the constant drumbeat of groundless accusation has
proven an effective weapon in weakening journalism's watchdog
function. Conservatives like William Kristol of the Weekly Standard
are well aware, as he put it, that "The press isn't quite
as biased and liberal. They're actually conservative sometimes."
But conservatives also know that if the press is effectively intimidated,
either by the accusation of liberal bias or by a reporter's own
mistaken belief in the charge's validity, the institutions that
conservatives revere-the military, corporate America, organized
religion, and the powerful conservative groups themselves-will
be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence.
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