Mercury Rising

When I saw Nicholas Lemann's column in the New Yorker, The Wayward Press. Why Everyone is Mad at the Mainstream Media, I thought that at last we might, see some honest discussion of press bias. Imagine my surprise in discovering that Karl Rove is "Everyone." Or near enough: the first 800 words of 5000 were devoted to Karl Rove's pulings about the unfairness of New York Times to the Republican Party. Evidently Rove or Lemann have forgotten the critical role The Times played in putting George W. Bush in the White House, damaging Bill Clinton's presidency with pseudoscandals and then circulating petty lies to damage perceptions of Al Gore's character. My bet is that Lemann is the one with a bad memory. Right now we are being treated to a prime example of how the "Mainstream Media" serves the Republican Party. That media has, as yet, found no story in the fact that the White House invited a gay hooker-- one who may have been used as the means to expose a CIA agent and her network to harm as part of petty political revenge-- to serve as part of the regular press gaggle. People with long memories might wonder what it is about the Bush family that so attracts homosexuals, prostitutes, and perhaps pedophiles to hang around the White House. Yes, it would also be nice to know why the nation is being plunged into war and insolvency through a systematic campaign of lies. But at least the "Mainstream Media" should be able to cover a sex scandal. They had a good deal of practice on Clinton. Evidently people like Lemann and Keller are hypnotized by the cult-like determination with which conservatives demonize the press. One can't help but laugh when reading lines like "openly ideological, anti-mainstream-media, [conservative] quasi-news programs like Rush Limbaugh's radio show have huge followings." The biggest media news story of the last year is the rise of Air America radio-- which has been using Clear Channel stations and thereby shutting down conservative outlets. The article is best read ironically. Lemann says that "Most mainstream-media organizations, worried at being culturally and politically out of synch with many Americans, are making an effort to reach out...." To conservatives. In Lemann's article, there's no outreach to the other side of the aisle. Lemann & Co. have become little Ahabs, seeking to hook the white whale of conservatism on their journalism, blind to the fact that this whale is a fundamentally destructive force, one that will destroy them for certain, and us if we follow them. The people in the newsrooms are clueless as to what the national debate is all about, so they think they need to listen to one side of it. They cannot seem to hear the millions of Americans in the center, those who (for example) responded to Bill Clinton's call that abortion be safe, legal, and rare. A real abortion debate would be over how to make abortion rare without infringing on rights. And that would take us into territory that the Republican Party does not want discussed: making contraception part of a right to public health, equal educational opportunity and the economic opportunity that flows with it, and other known and proven methods of preventing children from being unwanted. Yes, if one reads well below the fold, one will discover that Lemann mentions that people other than so-called conservatives are upset. In yet another illustration of how deficient journalism has become, this segment is framed as liberals (who may well be engaged in "calculated Mau-mauing") as the second side for false balance. Left out are the well-documented examples of journalistic fictions, such as those spun by Jayson Blair, Jeff Gerth, and Katherine Seelye, for example. Edward Murrow may have been a liberal, but I don't think he just made stuff up. How can any responsible journalism consider it balanced to compare ravings that a photo of a smiling Al Gore proves that he's glad Bush hasn't caught bin Laden with stories that have been publicly retracted (or that, in the case of Seelye, have unfortunately not been properly retracted but have become a Kennedy School of Government case study in bad journalism)? The so-called mainstream media has indeed become the problem, the barrier preventing a national conversation. Just not for the reasons Lemann thinks.

# posted by Charles @ 2/15/2005 08:52:00 AM