The Milwaukee Journal
March 7, 2003
By Dave Zweifel

Only a few days ago the latest Gallup Poll reported that 45 percent of Americans believe that the nation's media are "too liberal," while 15 percent said they are "too conservative."

To Eric Alterman, a longtime contributor to many liberal publications, including serving as media columnist for The Nation, that would only serve to show how well the country's ultra-conservatives have fostered the myth that America's media lean to the left.

His new book, "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News," was written to counter the previously unchallenged best sellers written by Bernard Goldberg ("Bias") and Ann Coulter ("Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right"). And he does a masterful, painstakingly documented job of it.

He admits up front that "only a liberal would be dumb enough to title a book 'What Liberal Media?' " But someone has to take a serious look behind the charges to find the truth.

"Think of the wholly fictitious but illustrative story about little George Washington and his inability to lie about that cherry tree," he writes. "For conservatives, and even more many journalists, the 'liberal media' is just that: a myth, to be certain, but a useful one. If only it were true, we might have a more human, open-minded and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the nation."

He accuses Goldberg and Coulter of writing books that are full of self-serving anecdotes with no sources or documentation of their charges that the "liberals" control everything from newspapers to television. (Goldberg's treatise primarily accuses CBS-TV.)

Instead, Alterman claims, in most cases the opposite is true. The right has so cowed the American media that they typically bend over backward to give conservatives equal time, so much so that conservatives typically get more exposure than the supposed liberal viewpoints. And, that, he insists, has been the right's agenda all along - sort of like the old saw that if you tell a lie enough times, it is eventually perceived as the truth.

"The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla, much of the media - fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of 'balance' - won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown," he writes.

Alterman details how most of the so-called "liberal" media provide space or air time for counter views. The op-ed pages of papers most vilified by conservatives as liberal - the New York Times and Washington Post, for example - are teeming with conservatives such as William Safire, George Will, Charles Krauthammer. If CNN is so liberal, then how do you explain it giving so much airtime to the likes of Robert Novak, William Bennett and others?

The truth, he says, is that "even the genuine liberal media is not so liberal."

Conversely, when do you hear a liberal view expressed on the Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robinson shows or any of the other right-wing media outlets that have proliferated in recent years?

After setting the stage by attacking the liberal premise and pointing out that it is mainly conservatives who own most of the media in the first place, he devotes full chapters to what he labels the "punditocracy," which he insists shapes the national debate in everything from Sunday morning talk shows to the nation's op-ed pages, and is principally conservative.

With few exceptions, Alterman writes, the so-called liberals aren't liberals at all. Indeed, he says, if you compared supposed American liberals with the European media, they'd be to the right of center.

He also devotes entertaining chapters to everything from Bill Clinton and how he was savaged by that so-called liberal media (Alterman abbreviates that to SCLM throughout his book), to the reporting from Florida during the Bush-Gore recount debate, to the media treatment of the current president.

And he winds it all up with a telling chapter on what he calls the "really conservative media," outlining in great detail the power and influence that the conservative media actually wield and the tactics they use.

This is a long overdue book that may cause some of that 45 percent in the Gallup Poll to rethink their opinion.

Dave Zweifel is the editor of The Capital Times.