Punditocracy Four: Experts

excerpted from the book

What Liberal Media?

The Truth About Bias and the News

by Eric Alterman

Basic Books, 2003, paper

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For many years, most of the experts solicited by reporters were members o e Establishment, either from academia or research institutes such as the Brookings Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, or the Council on Foreign Relations, where many ex-officials came to rest after serving their time in office. These scholars and ex-officials tended to lean toward the center-left of the American consensus on social and economic matters, but shilly-shallied back and forth between hawkish Cold War ideology and dovish developmental arguments about foreign policy.

The center of political gravity began to change, however, in the mid-1970s, with a financially driven political transformation of the world of policy expertise. Inspired by writings of Irving Kristol, conservatives had come to believe that the Establishment had lost its collective nerve and joined the counter cultural Jacobins of the antiwar and civil rights movements, thereby creating a new class dedicated above all to its own perpetuation. This New Class, with its ready access to the media, academia, and the world of foundations, enjoyed manipulating Americans into believing that they were an evil people who rained death and destruction on Vietnam in order to satisfy their own sick compulsions. Watergate, during which the media carried out a successful coup d'etat (in Norman Podhoretz's judgment), only increased the appetite of the New Class for cultural supremacy, masked as consensus. New Class radicals had swallowed the entire political and academic establishment and annexed the Supreme Court. Working with Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and a few like-minded intellectuals, Kristol set about wresting control from the New Class. Armed with corporate and conservative fortunes, Kristol and others organized to create an alternative or Counter-Establishment.

The plan worked magnificently. With billions made available by billionaires like Nelson and Bunker Hunt of Texas, Richard Mellon Scaife of Pennsylvania, Joseph Coors of Colorado, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of Seoul, the right set about changing the terms of the debate. Unable to transform (or blow up) the Brookings Institution, the conservatives created the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Heritage Foundation, and a host of smaller ideological shops to drown out the liberals and moderates with their own analyses. According to a 1997 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, between 1992 and 1994 alone, just twelve conservative foundations awarded $210 million to various right-wing agenda-building institutions. The comparable figure raised for liberal groups-such as the extremely cost-effective Center for Budget and Policy Priorities-was just $18.6 million. What's more, the larger conservative foundations and think tanks are just the visible tip of a mighty iceberg. The 2000 edition of the Heritage Foundation's guide to conservative research and pressure groups in Washington listed 300 like-minded groups in the Washington area alone.

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With an operating budget of just over $32.5 million in 2000, [the Heritage Foundation] tends to overshadow all other right-wing research institutes while also setting the agenda for those that follow in its wake. With the virtually unprecedented generosity of its conservative donor base, Heritage created a new type of research organization that paid considerably less attention to "research" than traditional think tanks on the model of the Brookings Institute, and far more to political activism, coupled with self-conscious construction of conservative cadres in every branch of government and the media.

The result of these differences is that Heritage is equipped to be much more of a "player" in the daily rough-and-tumble of political decisionmaking than are its competitors. Its scholars are not "scholars" in the traditional sense, but more like political operatives. They are expected to spend at least as much time networking with reporters and government staffers as on research, which must be up to date and on time. Heritage expends a great deal of effort on tracking legislation and, frequently, shaping the hearings as well as press coverage of those hearings. For these reasons, among many others, the right's "research" is not constricted by academic standards of scholarship and evidence, and most of it would not stand up to such scrutiny. As Heritage President Edwin Feulner explained in 1995, "We don't just stress credibility. We stress timeliness. We stress an efficient, effective delivery system. Production is one side; marketing is equally important." Burton Pines, a Heritage vice president, has added, "We're not here to be some kind of Ph.D. committee giving equal time. Our role is to provide conservative public-policymakers with arguments to bolster our side."

Heritage computers are stocked with the names of over 3,500 journalists, organized by specialty. Every Heritage study goes out with a synopsis to those who might be interested; every study is turned into an op-ed piece, distributed by the Heritage Features Syndicate, to newspapers that wish to publish them. Heritage has two state-of-the-art television studios in its offices. Its Lehrman Auditorium is equipped with an advanced communications system for live feeds to TV and radio networks. "Our targets are the policymakers and the opinion-making elite," said Pines. "Not the public. The public gets it from them." Heritage provides lawmakers and talk-show guests with colored index cards stating conservative positions in pithy phrases on every imaginable issue. According to Heritage's "vice president for information marketing," these cards have been "wildly successful" with Republicans in Congress for media appearances. They are also a big help for conservative pundits on television, who otherwise would risk embarrassment due to how ill-informed they are on a variety of issues about which they are called upon to argue. -

While the foundation's burgeoning influence only became visible to mainstream observers with Ronald Reagan's 1980 election to the presidency, it had been building slowly for years. On October 3, 1983, at Heritage's black-tie tenth-anniversary banquet, Reagan himself declared: "Historians who seek the real meaning of events in the latter part of the twentieth century must look back on gatherings such as this." Indeed, the foundation's Mandate for Leadership became a blueprint in the Reagan White House. The mandate advocated greater freedom for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, coupled with reductions in spending for education, welfare, health services, and other social programs. Perhaps as many as two-thirds of these recommendations were adopted within Reagan's first year in office. Mandate for Leadership II, written when Reagan won reelection in 1984, recommended massive cutbacks in food stamps, Medicare, child nutrition, farm assistance, and legal services for the poor, along with the vast expansion of U.S. missile defense research and support for right-wing dictatorships. These, too, would become a staple of political discussion during the next few years. In spite of even these stunning successes, the foundation's influence reached its zenith with the administration of George W. Bush. Times were certainly flush. In April 2001, three months after the inauguration, the foundation unveiled plans for a second building housing an additional 63,000 square feet of space, next door to its already spacious headquarters. During the Bush transition, Heritage staffers passed on 1,200 to 1,300 names and resumes to the White House and were said to emerge quite pleased with the number who were eventually hired, including the current Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, a former Heritage Distinguished Fellow.

Just how much of the foundation's achievements are attributable to its burgeoning media presence is hard to quantify. Heritage's mission statement, written in 1973, calls for the foundation to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense."

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According to FAIR's study of over 25,823 citations for the twenty-five leading think tanks, as quoted in the Nexis database files for major papers and broadcast transcripts, the top think tanks were ranked as follows (pre-9/11 rankings appear first, post-9/11 rankings appear in parentheses).

1 (2): Brookings Institution
2 (6): Cato Institute
3 (5): Heritage Foundation
4 (1): National Bureau of Economic Research
5 (8): American Enterprise Institute
6 (4): Council on Foreign Relations
7 (3): Center for Strategic and International Studies
8 (7): RAND Corporation
9 (22): Family Research Council

Although Brookings, Carnegie, and others are often called "liberal" by conservatives, this is clearly done for strategic reasons. The head of Brookings during the Clinton years was a Republican. So too are many of its fellows. Much the same can be said of Carnegie and the Council on Foreign Relations, both of which boast a healthy percentage of ex-denizens of the Reagan and Bush administrations in their most influential positions. Genuinely liberal think tanks of the type where mainstream Republicans and conservatives would honestly feel out of place do not really enter the picture until we get to numbers eleven (the Urban Institute) and twelve (Economic Policy Institute). Adding them all together, conservatives enjoy about 48 percent of all mentions, centrists 36 percent, and progressives just 16 percent.

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The right continues to fund far more than attacks on traditional liberal policies. Liberalism itself is attacked as illegitimate. To understand how alien leftist beings have kidnapped your college-age children, see Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1988) and Charles J. Sykes's Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988). Also quite popular among conservative funders has been a full-frontal attack on the "culture of the Sixties." With that in mind, we have the Manhattan Institute's Myron Magnet, whose The Dream and the Nightmare (1993) blamed the Sixties counterculture for the creation of the urban underclass; John DiIulio's Olin-funded jihad, an endless series of journal articles, against a "permissive" penal code; Allan Bloom's best-selling jeremiad against modernity, The Closing of the American Mind (1987); and a seemingly endless series of scoldings about our moral failings by the likes of Robert Bork, William Bennett and Michael Novak. Each one of these books was generously supported by one or more of the foundations mentioned above, and each has played a significant role in moving the political discourse to the right. During the House impeachment vote, for instance, ABC News chose Bennett and NBC chose Bork as guest commentators despite the fact that their positions were deeply outside the mainstream of popular opinion on the subject. No liberals were similarly deployed.

What's more, these funders have set up an entire echo-chamber network of publications to support the works of their writers, the better to inject them into the bloodstream of mainstream media debate.

Bradley's list of subsidized authors, for instance, includes Charles Murray, Terry Eastland, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, John DiIulio, and Amitay Schlaes. Their books are almost always favorably and prominently praised in widely disseminated reviews in such organs funded by Bradley (together with Scaife and the Olin Foundation) as the National Interest and the Public Interest (both overseen by Irving Kristol), Commentary (funded by Rupert Murdoch and the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife foundations among others), the New Criterion (funded by Scaife and Olin), Reason (funded by Scaife, among others), American Spectator (funded with Scaife, Olin, and Bradley money), the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, and AEI's American Enterprise-along with William Buckley's National Review, Steve Forbes's Forbes, Robert Bartley's Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, New York Post, and Fox News Channel and network. On PBS these ideas are often taken up on the program, Think Tank, hosted by AEI's neoconservative political scientist Ben Wattenberg and funded in large measure by the Bradley, Olin, and Smith Richardson foundations. Taken together, these publications and outlets pack a powerful cultural wallop. Add them to the numerous and well-respected right-wing pundits working in mainstream newspapers and television stations and you have the makings of a media tsunami.

What Liberal Media?

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