[ Posted Wednesday, Febrauary 12, 2003 ]

Q&A
Eric Alterman on Bias in the Media.

BY JESSE OXFELD | On September 11, 2001, Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation and blogger for MSNBC, was at work on a book about the power of money in the world of ideas. "I wasn't doing a great job on it," he says, "and after that I was feeling increasingly detached." Soon his friend Todd Gitlin, the Columbia University media theorist, e-mailed just one sentence: "You should write a book called 'What Liberal Media?'." "Bingo," thought Alterman. "That's exactly what I should be doing." He didn't like the way September 11 was being reported, and he wanted to address the new discourse. So he delved into his voluminous files, accumulated in his work for The Nation and elsewhere ("I'm a long way from being the world's best reporter," he says, "but I'm an incredibly systematic researcher"), and he looked into Gitlin's question. What Liberal Media? became Alterman's new book, and his to answer to Gitlin's question is that—contrary to conventional wisdom—there's no such thing. (Read more about What Liberal Media? at www.whatliberalmedia.com, and then buy it on amazon.com.)

Is your argument—that there isn't a leftward bias—simply a defensive argument? Or is it also supposed to be a pro-active argument, that not only isn't there the leftward bias but, in fact, there is a rightward bias?
The media are socially liberal, although not as socially liberal as people seem to imagine they are, because their social liberalism has been crushed to an enormous degree by the conservative onslaught on the "liberal media." And most reporters and editors and certainly media proprietors are economically conservative. So the media are conservative on economic issues, and maybe more liberal than conservative on social issues—but I think they bend over backwards to be more than fair to conservatives. And the upshot of these two forces leads them to be much more sympathetic to Republicans and conservatives then they are to Democrats and liberals.

I think you have all the evidence you could ever want for that in the coverage of the 2000 election, the coverage of Florida, in the coverage that George Bush has received, and in the incredible amount of attention paid to Bill Clinton's financial shenanigans and personal foibles compared with those of George Bush, which, in my view, are far more significant and yet receive a tiny fraction of attention.

How does it happen that the news coverage ends up having a slight lean towards the conservative side when everyone agrees—and studies show—that most reporters and editors are Democrats and lean liberal on social issues at least?
There's one study that they keep quoting about Washington reporters that voted for Clinton in 1992, and that's a bad study. It purports to be of Washington journalists but it's really a questionnaire that was sent out to those Washington journalists who are registered with the Congressional press corps. I think it was sent out to roughly 400 people and they got about 130 responses. No social scientist would accept that response rate to draw any conclusions in the first place. Now, if you look at who they sent the study to, it's not the people who are on the McLaughlin Group, it's not the people at the Wall Street Journal. Plus, it's not up to reporters what gets in the newspapers and what gets on television, it's up to editors and producers and owners, and those people are a lot more conservative. So that study doesn't convince me really of anything. And even if that were a great study it still wouldn't tell you what goes in the media; it would just tell you what people think.

Journalists are much tougher on Democratic candidates then they are on Republican candidates. If you don't admit that the media were much tougher on Al Gore than they were on George Bush then you're just not an honest person. There was no contest, if you look at the numbers of stories that were done and the lies that were told about Gore's positions and the idiotic nature of the coverage about Love Story and Love Canal, in all of which Gore got completely a raw deal in terms of how inaccurate the coverage was. He didn't say he invented the Internet, he didn't say he discovered Love Canal. And all he did with Love Story is accurately quote a report he'd read in the Nashville Tennessean 14 years earlier. And these stories were blown up and repeated thousands of times. And in the meantime, George Bush deserted his National Guard post, he may or may not have been guilty of insider trading, he was cleared by a friend of his daddy's, and none of these stories showed up.

How does this happen, that the coverage is so imbalanced?
It's complicated, it happens for a lot of different reasons. Part of it is that Republicans scare journalists. I think I say in the book something like, Republicans are from Venus, Democrats and journalists are from Mars. Democrats and journalists are the same kind of people. They're interested in politics, they care about the issues, and so they're naturally much harder on Democrats, that's (a). Then (b) is that they hated Al Gore—they just hated his guts. They detested him and they couldn't hide that fact; they didn't even try. There's an incident described in the book—I wasn't there but I read about it in Time—where Gore's face came up during the debate with Bradley and the press room began to boo, loudly, and yell. These are people who adhere to the tenets of journalistic objectivity.

And if you compare that coverage in The New York Times between Katharine Seelye of Gore and Frank Bruni of Bush, that's all you really need to say. I don't think any sane person would argue that the Times wasn't much, much kinder to Bush than it was to Gore. And this had an incredibly important effect on such a close election. And you can make exactly the same arguments and compare the coverage of Clinton and Bush. They were all over Clinton for a land deal that he ended up losing money on, $70 million was spent investigating it. Harken Oil was a much bigger deal, it made Bush's fortune, and the things that he may or may not have been guilty of”we don't know because the press won't investigate it—are much more serious. And yet the story lived and died in the matter of a week. Same thing with Bush's desertion from his military post. If that had been Clinton we would have been hearing about it every night. Another reason is that there is actually a conservative movement in this country and there is no liberal movement. I mean it's like half of the nation versus The Wall Street Journal and Fox News and The New York Post and The Washington Times.

Do you think you're going to change people's minds with all the evidence you've gathered?
Yeah I do. I've only had one review, it was from Publishers Weekly, but I was very proud of it. They said, "Regardless of whether or not you agree with Alterman, you have to acknowledge he's convincing with his"—I can't help but say this—"his compulsively readable evidence." I don't see how you can read the two chapters, the one of Florida and the one of the 2000 election, and make the argument that the media is not much, much harder on Democrats than on Republicans. I covered the 2000 election and I covered Florida—not that I covered the issues themselves, I covered the media—and yet when I went back to it systematically, I couldn't believe how bad it was.

But isn't this the kind of issue where people believe what they believe and you're not going to convince many people to change their view? Don't you think people coming at this from a rightward view are going to say, well he works for The Nation, what do you expect?
Well people from right, yes. But I think a lot of people, particularly a lot of journalists, have just heard this "liberal media, liberal media, liberal media," and they assume it's true because they've been hearing it for 30 years. It's been an incredibly expensive and impressive campaign by the right to convince journalists that the media are liberal. It's not true. I think there are a lot of people out there who have heard the words, "liberal media," but who have never really thought about it. And if they're interested in the topic enough to pick up the book, I think I have those people.

Jesse Oxfeld will take over as mediabistro.com's editor-in-chief this Monday.