Author: Norman Solomon

You’ve probably heard a lot of spooky tales about “the liberal media.”

Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced news outlets that were offending the Nixon administration in the autumn of 1969, the specter has been much more often cited than sighted. “The liberal media” is largely an apparition — but the epithet serves as an effective weapon brandished against journalists who might confront social inequities and imbalances of power.

During the last few months, former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg’s new book Bias has stoked the “liberal media” canard. His anecdote-filled book continues to benefit from enormous media exposure.

In interviews on major networks, Goldberg has emphasized his book’s charge that American media outlets are typically in step with the biased practices he noticed at CBS News — where “we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn’t bother to identify liberals as liberals.”

But do facts support Goldberg’s undocumented generalization? To find out, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg searched a database of 30 large daily newspapers in the United States. He disclosed the results in an analysis that aired March 19th on the national radio program Fresh Air.

Nunberg discovered “a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives — but not in the direction that Goldberg claims.” Actually, the data showed, “the average liberal legislator has a 30 percent greater likelihood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does.”

When Nunberg narrowed his search to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times — three dailies “routinely accused of having a liberal bias” — he learned that “in those papers, too, liberals get partisan labels 30 percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large.”

And what about Goldberg’s claim that media coverage is also slanted by unfairly pigeonholing stars of the entertainment industry? His book declares flatly: “If we do a Hollywood story, it’s not unusual to identify certain actors, like Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis, as conservatives. But Barbra Streisand or Rob Reiner, no matter how active they are in liberal Democratic politics, are just Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner.”

Again, Nunberg found, the facts prove Goldberg wrong: “The press gives partisan labels to Streisand and Reiner almost five times as frequently as it does to Selleck and Willis. For that matter, Warren Beatty gets a partisan label twice as often as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Norman Lear gets one more frequently than Charlton Heston does.”

The results are especially striking because the word “liberal” has been widely stigmatized, observes Nunberg, a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. “It turns out that newspapers label liberals much more readily than they do conservatives.”

So while Goldberg hotly contends — without statistical backup — that conservatives get a raw deal because they’re singled out for ideological labeling more than liberals are, Nunberg relies on empirical evidence to reach a very different conclusion: “If there is a bias here, in fact, the data suggests that it goes the other way — that the media consider liberals to be farther from the mainstream than conservatives are.”

It’s unlikely that factual debunking will do much to slow the momentum of those who are intent on riding the “liberal media” poltergeist. It has already carried them a long way.

Not surprisingly, President Bush displayed Goldberg’s book for photographers at the White House a couple of months ago. For a long time, GOP strategists have been “working the refs” — crying foul about supposed media bias while benefiting greatly from the efforts of an unparalleled national media tag team that includes the likes of Rush Limbaugh, a slew of corporate-funded think tanks, and plenty of rightward pundits in print and on television.

It doesn’t hurt that during the past 70 years the Republican presidential candidate has received most of the daily newspaper endorsements in 16 out of 18 elections. How’s that for “liberal media”?

But, like a ghost that long ago assumed corporeal form in the minds of millions, “the liberal media” cannot die. That’s mostly because its image keeps being pumped up by huge media outlets.

In its first edition of this year, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial lauding Goldberg’s book and declaring that “a liberal tilt in the media” is among the “facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute.”

Overall, Goldberg’s book is a muddled hodgepodge. While bashing journalists as excessively sympathetic to the homeless, laid-off workers, and poor people, he attacks the media establishment as elitist. With variations of faux populism, he expresses indignation that low-income people are rarely heard or seen in mass media — yet he lambasts advocates for striving to widen the range of media coverage to include the voices of such people.

On bedrock issues of economic power, what passes for liberal-conservative debate in news media is usually a series of disputes over how to fine-tune the status quo. In the process, the myth of “the liberal media” serves as a smokescreen for realities of corporate media.

Norman Solomon’s syndicated AlterNet column focuses on media and politics.

The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established a decade ago to give recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year. As each winter arrives, I confer with Jeff Cohen of the media watch group FAIR to sift through the large volume of entries. This year, the competition was especially fierce. We regret that only a few journalists can win a P.U.-litzer.

And now, the 10th annual P.U.-litzer Prizes for the foulest media performances of 2001:

LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM AWARD — Cokie Roberts of ABC News’ This Week: On David Letterman’s show in October, Roberts gushed: “I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff, and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it. We had General Shelton on the show the last day he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I couldn’t lift that jacket with all the ribbons and medals. And so when they say stuff, I tend to believe it.”

PROTECTING VIEWERS FROM THE NEWS PRIZE — CNN chairman Walter Isaacson: “It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan,” said Isaacson in a memo ordering his staff to accompany any images of Afghan civilian suffering with rhetoric that U.S. bombing is retaliation for the Taliban harboring terrorists. As if the American public were too feeble-minded to remember September 11th, the CNN chief explained: “You want to make sure that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.”

PROTECTING READERS FROM THE NEWS PRIZE — Panama City News Herald: An October internal memo from the daily in Panama City, Florida, warned its editors: “DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper … has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails … . DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT.”

BEST EMBRACE OF TERRORIST MINDSET AWARD — Columnist Ann Coulter: This category had many candidates — pundits apparently trying to sound as fanatical as the terrorists they were denouncing — but it was won by Coulter, who wrote in September: “We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Runner-up: Thomas Woodrow and The Washington Times for a column headlined “Time to Use the Nuclear Option,” which asserted: “At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice.”

TORTUROUS PUNDITRY PRIZE — Jonathan Alter of Newsweek: In the November 5th edition, under the headline “Time to Think About Torture,” Newsweek‘s Alter wrote: “In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to … torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Some people still argue that we needn’t rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they’re hopelessly ‘Sept. 10th’ — living in a country that no longer exists.”

CHILD WARNOGRAPHY AWARD — Bob Edwards, NPR News: On a November 26th broadcast, the longtime anchor of Morning Edition interviewed a 12-year-old boy about a new line of trading cards marketed “to teach children about the war on terrorism” by “featuring photographs and information about the war effort.” The elder male was enthusiastic as he compared cards. “I’ve got an Air Force F-16,” Edwards said. “The picture’s taken from the bottom so you can see the whole payload there, all the bombs lined up.” After the boy replied with a bland “yeah,” Edwards went on: “That’s pretty cool.”

WILD ABOUT THAT MADMAN AWARD — Thomas Friedman of The New York Times: “I was a critic of Rumsfeld before, but there’s one thing … that I do like about Rumsfeld,” columnist Friedman declared on October 13th during a CNBC appearance. “He’s just a little bit crazy, okay? He’s just a little bit crazy and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us, and I’m glad we got some guy on our bench who’s just a little bit crazy. Not totally, but you never know what that guy’s going to do, and I say that’s my guy.”

HISTORY IS FOR WIMPS PRIZE — Newsweek: When Newsweek published a December 3rd cover story on George W. and Laura Bush, it was a paean to “the First Team” more akin to worship than journalism. Along the way, the magazine explained that the president doesn’t read many books: “He’s busy making history, but doesn’t look back at his own, or the world’s. Bush would rather look forward than backward. It’s the way he’s built, and the result is a president who operates without evident remorse or second-guessing.”

BLAME CERTAIN AMERICANS FIRST PRIZE — Televangelist/pundits Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: On the national 700 Club TV show, with host Robertson expressing his agreement, Falwell blamed the September 11th attacks on various Americans who had allegedly irritated God: “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.'”

AMERICA UNITED EXCEPT FOR THOSE DECADENT TRAITORS AWARD — Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic and Sunday Times of London: Columnist Sullivan, as if trying to prove that a gay-rights advocate can be as hysterically right-wing as a Falwell, wrote in mid-September: “The middle part of the country — the great red zone that voted for Bush — is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead — and may well mount a fifth column.”

SHEER O’REILLYNESS AWARD — Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly and Catherine Seipp of MediaWeek: A February profile of O’Reilly in MediaWeek quoted the TV host’s claim that the Los Angeles Times had never named the woman who’d accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978: “They never mentioned Juanita Broaddrick’s name, ever.” After it was pointed out that Broaddrick had been repeatedly mentioned in the Times, the writer of the MediaWeek profile, Catherine Seipp, commented that she would likely have caught the error “if I hadn’t been so mesmerized by O’Reilly’s sheer O’Reillyness. There’s just something about a man who’s always sure he’s right even when he’s wrong.”

Norman Solomon’s AlterNet column focuses on media and politics.

Some time before he committed suicide 38 years ago, leaving the Washington Post Company in the hands of his widow Katharine, publisher Philip Graham described journalism as “the first draft of history.”

Katharine Graham’s death prompted a flood of media accolades in mid-July. But history — no matter how early the draft — should not be distorted by easy adulation of the powerful.

A few hours after she passed away, typical coverage aired on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. The PBS program featured a roundtable discussion “to help us assess the life and impact of Katharine Graham.” One of the guests was historian Michael Beschloss, who often appears on major TV networks.

Beschloss summed up the historic role of Katharine Graham: “She always spoke truth to power,” he said. The assertion was absurd. Naturally, it went unchallenged by the other two panelists, both longtime high-ranking employees of the Washington Post Company.

After decades in The Washington Post newsroom as a national-security reporter, Walter Pincus was on hand to comment about Graham. “She had an instinct for honesty and what’s right,” he told viewers, “and the book is the first time that became public.”

“The book” — her acclaimed autobiography Personal History — received enormous media praise and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Graham’s death set off a new explosion of tributes to her bestseller.

On NPR’s Morning Edition, the editor of The New Yorker magazine opted for hyperbole. “She wrote one of the great autobiographies,” David Remnick said. The day before, he had been on the same network lauding the same book as “incredibly genuine and generous and real.”

Personal History is true to the first word of the title. The book does an excellent job of chronicling an individual’s struggle to rebound from tragedy and overcome sexist barriers. Yet the book is a heavy volume of historic narcissism — a magnum opus of upper-class vainglory and scrupulous evasion.

Prior to her admirable support for the Post‘s breakthrough reporting on Watergate nearly 30 years ago, Graham was a key player in the June 1971 battle over the Pentagon Papers. But such journalistic fortitude came late in the Vietnam War. During most of the bloodshed, the Post gave consistent editorial boosts to the war and routinely regurgitated propaganda in the guise of objective reporting. Graham’s book never comes close to acknowledging that her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon.

Though she was president of the Washington Post Company by then, Personal History makes no mention of the pivotal Gulf of Tonkin incident in early August 1964. Like other daily papers, the Post dutifully reported the U.S. government’s lies as facts. Within days, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, opening the door to massive escalation of the war.

Three years ago, I interviewed Murrey Marder, the reporter who wrote much of The Washington Post‘s coverage of the Tonkin Gulf events. He recalled that the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese navy had been shelling North Vietnamese coastal islands just prior to the supposed “attacks” by North Vietnam on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf. But the fix was in: “Before I could do anything as a reporter, The Washington Post had endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.”

Asked whether the Post ever retracted its Tonkin Gulf reporting, Marder replied: “I can assure you that there was never any retraction.” He added: “If you were making a retraction, you’d have to make a retraction of virtually everyone’s entire coverage of the Vietnam War.”

Graham’s 625-page book offers no hint of introspection about the human costs of her wartime discretion. In August 1966, she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page. “We agreed,” she wrote, “that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but that we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been.” Terrible years of further carnage resulted from such unwillingness to “be precipitous.”

While devoting many pages to her warm friendships with top U.S. government officials and business tycoons, Graham expresses no concern that the Post has been serving the political and economic agendas of corporate elites. The autobiography has little use for people beyond Graham’s dazzling peers. Even activists who made history are mere walk-ons. In her book, the name of Martin Luther King Jr. was not worth mentioning.

For a book so widely touted as a feminist parable, Personal History is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seem to exist in the great media executive’s range of vision.

If Katharine Graham “always spoke truth to power,” then journalism and history are lost in a murky twilight zone.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.