Punditocracy Three: Radio
and Internet
excerpted from the book
What Liberal Media?
The Truth About Bias and
the News
by Eric Alterman
Basic Books, 2003, paper
p70
Talk radio is a great deal more popular-and powerful-than most
of us realize. Twenty-two percent of all Americans surveyed say
they listen. In some major cities, the number is as high as 40
percent.' Conservative domination of the talk-radio airwaves is
so extensive as to be undisputed, even by the usual suspects.
There's not a single well-known liberal talk-show host in the
nation and barely a host who does not at least lean well in the
direction of the extreme right. The most popular shows are hosted
by Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Sean Hannity,
Armstrong Williams, Blanquita Collum, Michael Savage, Neil Boortz,
Bob Grant, Bob Dornan, Michael Medved, Michael Reagan, Dr. Laura
Schlesinger, Howard Stern, Don Imus, Michael Graham, Ken Hamblin,
and Laura Ingraham. Every single one is a movement conservative
with politics located at the extreme far-right end of the political
spectrum. So far to the right is the general pack of talk-show
hosts that, early in the Clinton Administration, G. Gordon Liddy
felt empowered to instruct listeners on the best way to assassinate
U.S. government officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms without receiving much in the way of censure from
this community. (His exact words were "Head shots. Head shots.")
Once, during a joint C-Span appearance with a right-wing talk-show
host and activist, Paul Weyrich, I challenged him to condemn Liddy's
statement and he refused, as he put it, to "criticize a brother
talk-show host," even for advocating the murder of U.S. government
officials. When Bill O'Reilly joined the ranks of radio talk-show
hosts in the spring of 2002, he could legitimately claim to be
a relative liberal in their midst. Even the Internet gossip Matt
Drudge, no stranger to irresponsible right-wing rumor-mongering,
says that when he has a story that is "playing among the
wing nuts, this tells me it's going to be a huge talk-radio thing."
Indeed, because the radio business has
become so centralized in recent years, it is easy for talk-show
hosts to spread themselves across the dial with incredible speed.
O'Reilly's show debuted in the spring of 2002 with 205 stations,
ahead of Michael Medved's 130, Sean Hannity's 150 or so, and Laura
Ingraham's nearly 200 markets. But O'Reilly was still way behind
Limbaugh's market share, which has gone as high as 650 stations
and anywhere from fifteen to twenty million listeners, depending
on whose statistics you prefer. Few progressives are ever given
shows, and efforts such as Gary Hart's and Mario Cuomo's haven't
amounted to much. The left-wing Texas populist Jim Hightower appeared
to be building a strong regional audience back in the mid-1990s,
but he was highly critical of Disney and its owner, Michael Eisner.
Not long after Disney bought the station, Hightower's show was
abruptly canceled. KGO in San Francisco, perhaps alone in the
country, boasts two liberal hosts, Bernie Ward and Ray Taliafero,
whose shows appear at 10 PM. to 1 A.M. and 1 A.M. to 5 A.M.- not
exactly primetime. The Washington Post's Paul Farhi notes, "The
drought has gotten so bad that the talk industry is starting to
manufacture its own outrage." A few months ago, Talkers magazine
reported on the existence of an anonymous creature it termed the
'Lone Liberal,' who was eager to appear on radio talk shows to
do battle with its legions of conservative hosts. Its publisher,
Michael Harrison, reported that this exotic animal was "hot
as a firecracker" on the circuit, averaging eight to nine
talk-show bookings a week. In fact, the Lone Liberal was always
a ruse, played by Harrison himself. "I'm far more conservative
than the Lone Liberal," he explained. "I live in the
real world."
Edward Monks, a Eugene, Oregon, attorney,
calculates that in his city, conservatives enjoy a 4,000-to-zero
hour advantage over liberals on the radio. He wrote in The Register-Guard:
"Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching
the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in
a totalitarian society.... There is nothing fair, balanced or
democratic about it." Monks noted that as recently as 1974,
such domination would have been not only inconceivable, but illegal.
Back then, the Federal Communications Commission was still demanding
"strict adherence to the [1949] Fairness Doctrine as the
single most important requirement of operation in the public interest-the
sine qua non for grant for renewal of license." This view
was ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 when it reaffirmed
the people's right to a free exchange of opposing views, with
roughly equal time given to all sides, if demanded, on the public
airwaves. The doctrine was overturned by the Reagan-appointed
FCC in 1987. The chairman then, Mark Fowler, made clear his view
that "the perception of broadcasters as community trustees
should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants."
Meanwhile, media companies, together with cigarette and beer companies,
working with Republican Senator Bob Packwood, set up the Freedom
of Expression Foundation to fight the fairness doctrine in the
U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. The companies won in
a 2-to-1 decision in which the two judges ruling in their favor
happened to be Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. President Reagan
vetoed attempts by Congress to reinstate the doctrine, and the
net result has been the complete far right domination of the nation's
airwaves, owing entirely to what analysts call "marketplace
realities."
The amazing career of Rush Limbaugh owes
a great deal to that moment in history. It is testament to just
how well success succeeds in the U.S. media, regardless of accuracy,
fairness, or even common sense. Limbaugh's legendary lies and
mythological meanderings have been rewarded not only with legions
of listeners, but also with incredible riches-a contract said
to be worth $250 million over seven years. It has also won him
the respect of the media establishment. Limbaugh, for instance,
has been treated to laudatory coverage in Time and Newsweek and
was invited by host Tim Russert of Meet the Press to be a guest
commentator on what is certainly the most influential political
program on television. And yet Limbaugh is, to put it bluntly,
deranged. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has published an
entire book of Rushisms that have turned out to be false, unsubstantiated,
or just plain wacko.
p74
Listening to Limbaugh, the idea that he enjoys genuine power in
the political life of the nation leaves you shaking your head
in awe and amazement. But it is impossible to ignore. Limbaugh's
radio audience is the largest any program on the medium has enjoyed
since the advent of television. President George H. W. Bush invited
him for a White House sleepover, as well as to be his honored
guest at his State of the Union address, seated next to Barbara
Bush, in a demonstration of fealty and respect. Shortly thereafter,
in 1993, National Review termed him "the leader of the opposition."
William Bennett averred that Limbaugh "may be the most consequential
person in political life at the moment." When the Republicans
took the House back in 1994 in a profound and humiliating rebuke
to President Clinton, Limbaugh's broadcast received a lion's share
of the credit. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz even
defended nonsense like the above as "policy oriented."
As Newt Gingrich's former press secretary Tony Blankley noted,
After Newt, Rush was the single most important
person in securing a Republican majority in the House of Representatives
after 40 years of Democratic Party rule. Rush's powerful voice
was the indispensable factor, not only in winning in 1994, but
in holding the House for the next three election cycles. At a
time when almost the entire establishment media ignored or distorted
our message of renewal, Rush carried (and of en improved) the
message to the heartland. And where Rush led the other voices
of talk radio followed.
This influence cannot be said to have
diminished markedly during the past decade even after Limbaugh
lost his most-favored targets when the Clintons left the White
House. Much to his chagrin as a McCain supporter, William Kristol
credits Limbaugh with rallying conservatives behind Bush during
the 2000 presidential primaries. "He helped make it the orthodox
conservative position that McCain was utterly unacceptable and
also that Bush was fine, neither of which were intuitively obvious
if you're a conservative," Kristol said. McCain's South Carolina
political adviser, Richard M. Quinn, concurred, adding that the
Arizona senator never recovered, in his opinion, from Limbaugh's
repeated descriptions of the conservative Republican as a "liberal"
in an extremely conservative state. "I never polled on the
impact of Limbaugh," Quinn told the New York Times. "But
anecdotally, I heard it all the time. You would hear on the street
repetition of what Rush was saying about McCain. There was a general
sense in the campaign that Limbaugh was definitely hurting us.
Blankley put it bluntly: "Given the closeness of the election,
but for Rush Limbaugh's broadcasts, we would now be led by President
Al Gore."
p75
While the Net is economically dominated by a tiny number of large
corporations, just like television and radio, the information
that appears on it is not. Standards for established news services
with a net presence have by and large been maintained; however,
the true story of political news on the Net is with the small,
right-wing sites that use the Web almost as effectively as they
use talk radio. Web sites like the Drudge Report, NewsMax.com,
WorldNetDaily.com, FreeRepublic.com, Townhall.com, Lucianne.com,
JewishWorldReview.com, and National Review Online boast regular
readers in the millions. What's more, they are dedicated readers
and in many cases, like the Limbaugh audience, so far to the right
as to tend toward outer space. For instance, Joseph Farah, a columnist
for Worldnet, warned his readers in October 2002, "The Democrats-far
too many of them-are evil, pure and simple. They have no redeeming
social value. They are outright traitors themselves or apologists
for treasonous behavior. They are enemies of the American people
and the American way of life." On Lucianne.com, a number
of posters celebrated the plane crash that killed Paul Wellstone,
his wife, and daughter, in late October 2002 and expressed the
hope that Ted Kennedy would meet a similar fate. Even further
out in the right wing ozonosphere, is the site FreeRepublic.com.
While posts terming Gore a "traitor" are commonplace,
alongside the addresses and phone numbers of allegedly liberal
politicians and judges, a UPI story unearthed one user who sympathized
with Timothy McVeigh and another who called him a "modern-day
Paul Revere." According to figures published in the New York
Times, the average "Freeper" Web visit lasts an amazing
five hours and fourteen minutes. It's not a hobby for these people,
it's a life.
p77
Undoubtedly the biggest star of Net journalism-its Rush Limbaugh
if you will-is the self-styled Walter Winchell-in-a-fedora, Matt
Drudge, who claims more than 100 million visits a month to his
bare-bones, next-to-no-graphics site. Like Limbaugh, Drudge professes
nothing but contempt for the mainstream news establishment. Viewed,
he crows, "daily not only by presidents and world leaders,
CEOs, anchormen and top media editors," Drudge claims to
be "powered" only by endless curiosity and a love of
freedom. Of course with numbers like his, the media he disdains
cannot help but celebrate him. Drudge was named one of Newsweek's
new media stars and Peoples Twenty-Five Most Intriguing People.
The American Journalism Review ran a cover story entitled, "Journalism
in the Era of Drudge and Flynt," and the Columbia Journalism
Review cited his outing of the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998
as one of the ten key dates in the media history of the twentieth
century.
Originally an amateur Hollywood gossip
who picked through garbage cans to get his goods, Drudge became
an overnight phenomenon as a kind of bulletin board for unsubstantiated
political rumor and right-wing character attacks. Drudge describes
his work habit as sitting in his apartment "petting the cat
and watching the wires- that's all I do." But he also receives
a great deal of e-mail. One of his favorite tactics is to steal
a working journalist's story-leaked to him internally-and post
its still-in the-works details on his Web site before the author
can publish them. His big moment in media history consisted of
little more than posting the purloined work of Newsweek's Michael
Isikoff, while the magazine's editors sought further confirmation
before publishing it. Drudge did it again when NBC News was trying
to decide how to handle an unsubstantiated twenty-one-year-old
accusation of sexual assault against President Clinton. Drudge
rarely bothers to independently verify his stories, so he often
appears prescient-when, in fact, he is simply overlooking what
is widely understood to be the essence of journalism. Tim Russert
learned this to his chagrin when Drudge posted three stories on
his site about the Buffalo-born newsman's considering a run for
governor of New York. "All three stories-they are just plain
dead wrong," Russert complained. "And he never called
me about them, never." The only surprising thing here is
Russert's surprise.
Drudge is a self-described misfit with
few social graces, and modesty is certainly not one of them. Drudge
calls his apartment "the most dangerous newsroom in America."
"If I'm not interesting, the world's not interesting,"
he writes. "And if I'm boring, you're boring." Despite
his disdain for traditional news ethics, and a lack of any discernible
effort in the areas of reporting or punditry, Drudge's impact
is huge. He counts his hits in the millions and can single-handedly
drive hundreds of thousands-sometimes millions-of readers to any
story he posts on the Web. When he purloined and posted Isikoff's
Lewinsky scoop, he jump-started a political meltdown that led
to the only impeachment of an elected president in American history.
When he then went on to post the story of Clinton's alleged mulatto
"love child," he made a national fool of himself, but
hurt no one, save those gullible and irresponsible media outlets-most
notably Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Sun Myung Moon's Washington
Times-who trusted him and reprinted it. But when he posted a malicious
lie about Clinton adviser and ex- journalist Sidney Blumenthal
having "a spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered
up," replete with "court records of Blumenthal's violence
against his wife," Drudge attacked an innocent man. But even
this did not seem to hurt Drudge's reputation. Much of the media
preferred Drudge to Blumenthal, whom many reporters resented for
personal and professional reasons. In none of these cases did
Drudge profess regret, though he did retract his false accusation
against Blumenthal before the latter launched a libel suit against
him. As for the Clinton "love child" concoction, Drudge
bragged, "I'd do it again."
During the Lewinsky crisis, Drudge became
so big the Internet could no longer contain him. He was given
his own television program on Fox, where he was free to spout
unconfirmed rumors with fellow conservative conspiracy nuts until
he was informed by management that he would not be allowed to
show a National Enquirer photo of a tiny hand emerging from the
womb during a spina bifida operation on the fetus. Drudge wanted
to use the photo as part of his campaign against legal abortion.
When even the Fox executives found this idea not only repulsive
but misleading, Drudge quit the show. Roger Ailes, whose brilliant
idea it had been to hire Drudge after watching him spout baseless
conspiracy theories on Russert's program, complained, "He
wants to apply Internet standards, which are nonexistent, to journalism,
and journalism has real standards. It can't work that way."
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Drudge is also a
successful force in radio, with a two-hour Sunday evening show
hosted by ABC that is heard in all fifty states and literally
hundreds of major markets.
Drudge also published a book-well, sort
of a book. The tome was "written" with the assistance
of the late Julia Phillips. Of the 247 pages contained in The
Drudge Manifesto, the reader is treated to forty blank pages;
thirty-one pages filled with fan mail; twenty-four pages of old
Drudge Reports; a thirteen-page Q& A from Drudge's National
Press Club speech; ten pages of titles and the like; six pages
of quotes from various personalities like Ms. Lewinsky and Madonna;
four pages of a chat transcript; and, well, a great deal more
filler. That leaves the reader with just 112 pages or barely 45
percent of actual book. (And even nine of these are Drudge poetry.
But even with all the strikes any journalist
could imagine and then some against him, Drudge still gets results
for his combination of nasty innuendo and right-wing politics,
often by planting items that would be picked up by allegedly respectable
journalists in national newspapers. In the Arkansas Senate race
of 2002, the Associated Press reported that Democrat Mark Pryor
found himself forced to respond "to an item on the Drudge
Report Web site of Internet gossip Matt Drudge" in a lightly
sourced story that alleged the hiring of an illegal immigrant
for housekeeping duties. (In fact the woman in question later
signed a sworn affidavit testifying to the fact that she was a
legal U.S. resident and had been paid to lie.)37 In May of the
same year, for example, Drudge carried a report that ex-conservative
journalist David Brock, whose Blinded by the Right embarrassed
virtually the entire movement, had suffered a "breakdown"
while writing the book and had to be hospitalized-something Brock
reluctantly confirmed when contacted. Drudge did not mention on
his site that he had considerable reason to hold a grudge against
Brock, who had published in his book that he received an e-mail
from the Internet snoop that said he wished the two could be "fuck
buddies." (Brock is an open homosexual. Drudge is not.) As
the gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile wrote, "You'd think
that no respectable journalist would further the new Drudge sludge
on Brock, at least not without a fuller explanation that included
Drudge's possible motives." But in fact the Washington Post
did publish it-or at least the parts Drudge wanted published,
leaving out any discussion of his motives-and adding quotes from
three conservatives who continued the character assassination
of Brock that Drudge initiated. Nowhere in the Post item did the
newspaper attempt to establish any journalistic relevance to the
item, which is rather amazing when you consider the fact that
its former publisher, the late Philip Graham, father of the current
head of the Post Company, Donald Graham, was himself hospitalized
for mental illness, before taking his own life. (Making this story
even stranger, the Post's Howard Kuru reported in 1999 that Drudge's
own mother had been hospitalized for schizophrenia.)
Just before Election Day 2002, Drudge
and Limbaugh combined, together with Brit Hume of Fox News and
the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to effect a smear against
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and, by extension,
the late Senator Wellstone's re-election campaign. This episode
too had all the trademarks of the conservative echo-chamber effect,
including unproven innuendo, inaccuracy, repeated cavalier use
of unchecked facts, all in the service of a clear political/ideological
goal. As reported by Bryan Keefer of Spinsanity, DSA posted a
pop-up advertisement on its site on October 9 seeking contributions
to pay the cost of bringing young people to Minnesota, where same-day
registration is legal, to help register Wellstone voters in what
was certain to be a dose race. Shortly after the advertisement
appeared, however, a local conservative organization sent out
a press release in which it manipulated the original text to make
it appear that DSA was planning to transport people not to register
Minnesotans to vote, but to vote themselves, with the hopes of
stealing the election.
Drudge saw the story in a local paper
and headlined his site's line: "Socialists Sending People
to MN to Illegally Vote for Wellstone." This apparently sent
Limbaugh into action, as the radio host melodramatically informed
his listeners, "DSA has been caught." With his typical
respect for accuracy, Rush added, "You can go in there and
register and vote and split the same day, you can go home, you
don't even have to spend the night in Minnesota and freeze if
you don't want to, you can go in there and vote and leave."
Next up was Fox News's Brit Hume, who announced to that network's
viewers, "The Democratic Socialists of America, which bill
themselves as the largest socialist organization in the country,
is raising tax-deductible money to send people to the state of
Minnesota, where they can take advantage of same-day registration
to vote for the liberal incumbent Paul Wellstone." These
reports apparently inspired the Journal editors who-again, contrary
to all available evidence-insisted, "The Democratic Socialists
of America recently posted an ad on their Web site inviting tax-deductible
contributions to 'bring young people to Minnesota' to vote in
the close U.S. Senate race there." As Keefer noted, while
the loosely worded ad did originally raise questions about whether
tax-deductible funds were being properly used for issue advocacy-and
hence was rewritten for clarifying purposes-never in any of its
texts did it even imply, much less encourage, anyone but Minnesotans
to pick their own senator. It is perfectly legal in that state
to encourage people to vote and even to take them to the polls.
Of course, Wellstone's death made the
effects of this story moot, but cases like the above demonstrate
just how profoundly journalistic times are a-changing. And the
result of these changes is yet another victory for conservatives
and scandalmongers-and in Drudge and Limbaugh's cases, both at
once-who seek to poison our political discourse with a combination
of character assassination, ideological invective, and unverified
misinformation. The resulting loss of credibility for phantom
SCLM bespeaks not only the profession's misfortune, but democracy's
as well.
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