Punditocracy One: Television

excerpted from the book

What Liberal Media?

The Truth About Bias and the News

by Eric Alterman

Basic Books, 2003, paper

first page

Boston Herald
"On talk radio, political opinion approaches a level of uniformity only seen in totalitarian societies."

p14
... conservatives have successfully cowed journalists into repeating their baseless accusations of liberal bias by virtue of their willingness to repeat them . . . endlessly.

p14
Washington Post White House reporter John Harris

"one big reason for Bush's easy ride: There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president."

p14

Washington Post White House reporter John Harris

[in 1993] Conservative interest groups, commentators and congressional investigators waged a remorseless campaign that they hoped would make life miserable for [President Bill] Clinton and vault themselves to power. They succeeded in many ways. One of the most important was their ability to take all manner of presidential miscues, misjudgments or controversial decisions and exploit them for maximum effect. Stories like the travel office firings flamed for weeks instead of receding into yesterday's news. And they colored the prism through which many Americans, not just conservative ideologues, viewed Clinton. It is Bush's good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist.

p17
... virtually the entire axis of political conversation in the United States takes place on ideological ground that would be considered conservative in just about every nation in democratic Western Europe.

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In late October 2002, I took a trip to five cities in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany to meet with dozens of influential writers, editors, and cultural voices, both individually and in groups, in these four countries. Everywhere people voiced considerable admiration and affection for "America" in the abstract and a deep, if sometimes baffling, attraction to American culture, both popular and literary. The once reflexive anti-Americanism inspired by the Vietnam War and the Cold War romance with communism among these elites had been entirely dispelled. Almost all expressed solidarity with America vis-a-vis the 9/11 attacks. Alessandro Portelli, editor of an Italian literary magazine, voiced the hope that America's recognition of its own vulnerability might help the nation develop some empathy for the vulnerable elsewhere in the world, who lack the ability to act on the world stage with impunity. Yet the primary response, as Portelli saw it, as voiced in the media and among well-known American intellectuals, has "a rhetoric of the exceptionalism of American sorrow," with a ready-made accusation of "anti-Americanism" employed to silence anyone who questions the views of the current administration. Similarly, in Paris, Jacques Rupnik of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales-a close friend and adviser to both ex-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin as well as the powerfully pro-American Czech President Vaclav Havel-endorsed the U.S. military response in both Afghanistan and the Balkans, expressing sincere gratitude. But, as with virtually everyone to whom I spoke, he took profound offense at "the extraordinary, almost staggering moral self-righteousness of this administration" toward the good opinion of the rest of the democratic world.

Virtually no one in high European media and cultural circles appeared willing to support or even defend the manner in which the Bush administration chose, unilaterally and without any prior consultation, to withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Nor was anyone to be found who thought it wise for the United States to refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the nascent International Criminal Court. Without questioning Israel's right to live freely and securely within internationally recognized boundaries, nobody at all in these nations had a good word for the administration's unstinting support for the campaign of Israel's Ariel Sharon to expand Israeli settlements beyond the "Green Line," isolate Yasir Arafat, destroy the Palestinian Authority, and re-occupy Palestinian lands. Nor could I find anyone among the many dozens of people I met who thought it wise or prudent for the United States to engage in a pre-emptive war in Iraq, though Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime inspired neither excuses nor illusions. The very idea of the administration's campaign to legitimate its declared right of "pre-emption" filled most of my fellow discussants with horror and dread. Europeans were also virtually unanimous in their disapproval of Bush's enthusiasm, while governor of Texas, for the death penalty, and shocked in particular at what they deemed to be the moral callousness of his comments regarding the frequency with which he was willing to employ it.

In the U.S. media, such views are routinely dismissed as the products of old-fashioned European anti-Americanism at best, anti-Semitism at worst, or frequently, both. But these views were repeated to me across the political spectrum by conservatives as well as liberals, by "pro-American" writers and thinkers as well as those who had traditionally been aligned with resistance to American power; they were spoken in nations whose leadership had agreed to support the administration in its efforts to organize the global community for war in Iraq as well as in those that opposed it, by Jews and gentiles alike. Whether one shares these views or not, the conclusion is inescapable: in autumn 2002, a consensus had formed across the Atlantic on virtually every significant issue facing the U.S.-Atlantic community that located itself well to the left of the mainstream views that dominated debate in America's SCLM. The neoconservative domination of the U.S. media's foreign policy debate is hardly atypical. Suffice to say that the domestic fault line within European media and intellectual circles is far enough to the left to be considered off the map in our own SCLM.

Fundamental European assumptions across the political spectrum regarding the value of social welfare programs, cultural Puritanism, labor rights, gun control, public financing of elections, public goods for all, and the need to invest in public education might place most editors closer to the center of gravity of a Nation magazine editorial board meeting than "responsible" opinion in respectable SCLM circles.

Indeed, the right's ideological offensive of the past few decades has succeeded so thoroughly that the very idea of a genuinely philosophically "liberal" politics has come to mean something quite alien to American politics.

p22
... print journalists have editors who have editors above them who have publishers above them who, in most cases, have corporate executives above them. Television journalists have producers and executive producers and network executives who worry primarily about ratings, advertising profits, and the sensibilities of their audience, their advertisers, and their corporate owners. When it comes to content, it is these folks who matter, perhaps more than anyone.

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Rarely does some story that is likely to arouse concern ever go far enough to actually need to be censored at the corporate level. The reporter, the editor, the producer, and the executive producer all understand implicitly that their jobs depend in part on keeping their Corporate parents happy.

p25
... in the winter of 2002 during the long, drawn-out debate over campaign finance reform. The dramatic events in question dominated domestic coverage for weeks, if not months-a fact that many conservatives attributed to liberal media bias, since Americans, while supportive of reform, did not appear to be passionately interested in the story. But even within this avalanche of coverage, virtually no one in the media thought it worthwhile to mention that media industry lobbyists had managed to murder a key provision of the bill that would have forced the networks to offer candidates their least expensive advertising rates. True, it was a hard story for which to create snappy visuals; "Dead behind the eyes" in Dan Rather's parlance. But why is that not viewed as a challenge rather than a cause for capitulation? Political campaigns have become a get-rich-quick scheme for local television station owners, whose profit margins reflect the high rates they charge for political advertisements. This is no small factor in the mad pursuit of money that characterizes virtually every U.S. political campaign and makes a mockery of our claims to be a "one-person, one-vote" democracy.

Estimates of the income derived from these advertisements are up to $750 million per election cycle and continue to rise. The provision in question, originally passed by the Senate by a 69 to 31 margin, died in the House of Representatives following a furious lobbying campaign by the National Association of Broadcasters and the cable television industry. After the House vote, Broadcasting & Cable magazine reported, "Back in their headquarters, the National Association of Broadcasters popped the champagne, deeply appreciative of the strong bipartisan vote stripping the [advertising provision]." The broadcasters' victory left the United States alone among 146 countries, according to one study, in refusing to provide free television time to political candidates.

The silent treatment given the advertising amendment was, in many ways, a repeat of the non-coverage of an even more significant story: The 1996 Telecommunications Act. When the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, the party leadership invited telecommunications corporate heads to Washington, sat down with them, and asked, "What do you want?" The result, after many millions of dollars worth of lobbying bills, was a milestone of deregulation that vastly increased the ability of the big media conglomerates to increase (and combine) their market share in almost every medium. This expansion came, virtually without exception, at the expense of the smaller voices in those markets. The net result turned out to be a significant diminution in the opportunities for citizens to experience, and participate in, democratic debate. Based on a quick perusal of TV listings for 1995, apparently not one of the major TV news magazines of Westinghouse/CBS (48 Hours, 60 Minutes), Disney/Cap Cities/ABC (Primetime Live, 20/20), or General Electric/NBC (Dateline NBC) devoted even a minute of their 300 or so hours of airtime to the bill or the issues that lay beneath it. Where, one might ask, were the SCLM when their corporate owners were rewriting the rules of democratic debate to increase their own profits?

Ultimately, as Tom Johnson, former publisher of the LA Times and later president of CNN, would observe,

It is not reporters or editors, but the owners of the media who decide the quality of the news . . . produced by or televised by their news departments. It is they who most often select, hire, fire, and promote the editors and publishers, top general managers, news directors, and managing editors-the journalists-who run the newsrooms.... Owners determine newsroom budgets, and the tiny amount of time and space allotted to news versus advertising. They set the standard of quality by the quality of the people they choose and the news policy they embrace. Owners decide how much profit should be produced from their media properties. Owners decide what quality levels they are willing to support by how well or how poorly they pay their journalists.

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... the punditocracy ... is dominated by two qualities: ignorant belligerence and sitcom-like silliness. The pundits are the conservatives' shock troops. Even the ones who constantly complain about alleged liberal control of the media cannot ignore the vast advantage their side enjoys when it comes to airing their views on television, in the opinion pages, on the radio, and on the Internet.

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Across virtually the entire television punditocracy, unabashed conservatives dominate, leaving lone liberals to offer themselves up to be beaten up by gangs of marauding right-wingers, most of whom voice views much further toward their end of the spectrum than does any regularly televised liberal. Grover Norquist, the right's brilliant political organizer, explains his team's advantage by virtue of the mindset of modern conservatism. "The conservative press is self-consciously conservative and self-consciously part of the team," he noted. "The liberal press is much larger, but at the same time it sees itself as the establishment press. So it's conflicted. Sometimes it thinks it needs to be critical of both sides." Indeed, Glastris observes, "liberal pundits . . . seem far more at ease on journalistic neutral ground, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, rather than in vigorously defending Democrats." Think about it. Who among the liberals can be counted upon to be as ideological, as relentless, and as nakedly partisan as George Will, Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, William Bennett, William Kristol, Fred Barnes, John McLaughlin, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Ben Wattenberg, Oliver North, Kate O'Beirne, Tony Blankley, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Tony Snow, Laura Ingraham, Jonah Goldberg, William F. Buckley Jr., Bill O'Reilly, Alan Keyes, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume, CNBC's roundtable of the self-described "wild men" of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and on and on? In fact, it's hard to come up with a single journalist/pundit appearing on television who is even remotely as far to the left of the mainstream spectrum as most of these conservatives are to the right. These people, as [Paul Glastris, editor of the neoliberal Washington Monthly] noted, "are ideological warriors who attempt with every utterance to advance their cause." To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship, and ideological extremism on the far left, a network would need to convene a "roundtable" featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and Fidel Castro.

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Done well, punditry can serve a crucial function in our democracy. This is, in part, an accident of American journalistic history. The media of most nations do not profess much faith in the notion of objective news-gathering. Journalists in Europe, for instance, freely mix fact and opinion to create a richer context for their reports and trust readers and viewers to know the difference and make up their own minds. Newspapers are more explicitly ideological there and readers generally choose their paper according to the view that matches their own. By and large, those nation's elite media offer fewer pundits but more sophisticated journalism.

But where journalism adopts the pretense of reporting only "the facts ma'am," the need for "opinion writers," dedicated to placing the news in a larger and more useful context for readers, rises accordingly. If reporters are doing their best to stick to a strict definition of facts-or, what is more common, the quotes of politicians and their press secretaries who attempt to spin these facts-then the creation of an understandable context for these facts, be it historical, political, sociological, economic, or even psychological, must be left to someone else. Even people who devote themselves to trying to remain informed cannot do so on every issue of importance-not if they have jobs, families, or lives that require them to occasionally turn off the TV, the computer, or put down their newspaper. Pundits can be particularly influential in the United States owing to the amazing degree of ignorance and / or apathy many Americans share regarding politics and public affairs. In a nation where six of ten high school students lack what the Department of Education terms "even a basic knowledge of U.S. history," and where more people can give pollsters the names of all three Stooges than any three members of the Supreme Court, the importance of someone helping out with a reasoned and intelligent contextual view of events can hardly be overstated."

This being America, much of our punditry takes place on television. The phenomenon, which had been a drizzle during the golden age of print pundits in the 1950s and early 1960s, grew rapidly in the 1980s and, with the explosion of cable news in the mid-1990s, became a kind of flood. As recently as 1992, the world punditry encompassed was still quite small. In a book published that year that gave the punditocracy its name, I defined its television members as the chairs on NBC's McLaughlin Group and Meet the Press, CBS's Inside Washington, ABC's This Week, and CNN's The Capital Gang, and Crossfire. Its print portfolio consisted of "the op-ed columns of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the top editorships of the New Republic and a few newsweekly columnists." Various experts, ex-officials, and think-tank mavens fleshed out its outer circle. Not many people outside academia had yet heard about the World Wide Web (as it was originally called), and cable news, which included only CNN, was still pretty much devoted to, well, news. In the mid- 1 990s, however, the advent of three all-news cable stations, coupled with the nearly overnight explosion of the Net, vastly inflated the punditocracy's numbers. As with major league baseball, the quality fell as the numbers rose. Players who should have ended their careers in high school or college ended up in the majors, and the level of public discourse catapulted south.

Few people, one imagines, give much thought to just what qualifies someone to be a television pundit. In fact, the criteria upon which network executives and news producers base their choices largely relies on television "Q-ratings" rather than knowledge or expertise. For pundit chat, these qualities usually include: not being too fat or too ugly; the ability to speak in short sentences and project an engaging personality; and a willingness to speak knowingly about matters about which one knows little or nothing. Believe it or not, ignorance is actually an advantage, since it allows you to ignore the inherent complexity of any given problem with a concise quip and a clear conscience. As Capital Gang panelist Margaret Carlson observed, "The less you know about something, the better off you are.... They're looking for the person who can sound learned without confusing the matter with too much knowledge. I'm one of the people without too much knowledge. I'm perfect." Carlson's honesty is rare and engaging. More typical is Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, who once boasted, "I can speak to almost anything with a lot of authority." It was on this epochal program that John McLaughlin conducted a roundtable in which he asked his guests to "give a grade to the planet earth." McLaughlin gave it a "B," and I quote his justification in its entirety: "Overcoming nationalism and a general spirit of internationalism." The ability to say such things on television with a straight face is considered prima facie qualification for the job of network television pundit.

Owing to its tangled roots in personal journalism, political commentary, and television production values, the punditocracy never developed a recognizable code of ethics. This situation was further complicated by the entry into the profession in the early 1980s of large numbers of political operatives who could not even pretend to consider themselves journalists. No longer a reward for the profession's most distinguished members, the job opened up to political deal-makers, speechwriters, press flacks, and professional ideologues. Moreover, there were almost no rules of professional conduct. George Will felt free to coach Ronald Reagan on his debating technique and then praise his student's "thoroughbred performance" on ABC News immediately following the debate. Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes of Fox News Channel's The Beltway Boys sell their dinner conversation to wealthy American Express Platinum Card holders "by invitation only." Robert Novak hosts pricey off the-record briefings by Cabinet officials for corporate executives, refusing admission to journalists.

The money available to celebrity journalists for corporate appearances is fantastic. Steve and Cokie Roberts, for instance, commanded $45,000 for a joint appearance at a banking conference in Chicago in 1994. They also accepted a paid gig from the Philip Morris tobacco corporation, though Cokie claimed to be sick at the last moment and Steve went alone. Buckraking journalists are understandably reluctant to discuss this aspect of their lives. A spokesman responded to a journalist's inquiry that Cokie Roberts's corporate speaking fees were "not something that in any way, shape, or form should be discussed in public." Though Roberts is certainly among the most enthusiastic of buckrakers, she is hardly alone. Television personalities can augment their income by hundreds of thousands of dollars this way, and there is almost no work involved, beyond attending a cocktail party and giving a canned speech. The obvious ethical problem involved with a journalist who covers Congress taking money from corporations that lobby Congress has received considerable attention and many media companies have banned the practice. What has gone relatively unnoticed, however, is the manner in which the mere existence of this money skews the media rightward. Journalists are not being paid tens of thousands to give a single speech by public school children, welfare mothers, individual investors, health-care consumers, or even (in most instances) unions. They are taking it from banks, insurance companies, investment houses, and all manner of unindicted CEOs. If they want to continue to be invited, they had better not write anything that might offend these people. It is a rule of thumb that speaking bureaus prefer to represent conservatives because it is they who command interest from corporations. For an aspiring pundit, eager for the most lucrative possible career, speaking fees act as a built-in ideological incentive to side with big business over the "little guy." James Fallows quotes ex-Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee making the point in typically blunt fashion: "If the Insurance Institute of America, if there is such a thing, pays $10,000 to make a speech, don't tell me you haven't been corrupted. You can say you haven't and you can say you will attack insurance issues in the same way, but you won't. You can't." Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, a frequent television commentator, added, "You tell me what is the difference between somebody who works full time for the National Association of Realtors and somebody who takes $40,000 a year in speaking fees from Realtor groups. It's not clear to me there's a big distinction."

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Jeffrey Scheuer, the author of a scholarly work on television and conservatism

"A sound bite society, insists on simplicity, and simplicity is an inherent characteristic of conservative politics.

What Liberal Media?

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