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Jewish World Review June 3, 2005 / 25 Iyar, 5765 The Right's balance By Jeff Jacoby
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
John Kerry had a complaint. Six months after winning more than 59 million votes in his bid for the White House, — the second-highest total in US history — the Massachusetts senator was lamenting to a roomful of Boston Globe columnists and editorial writers that voters can't hear Democrats above the roar of the GOP spin machine.
The right, he groused, is far more effective than the left at making itself heard. To peddle their ideas, Republicans and conservatives have assembled an elaborate communication network, one that relies on the likes of "Cato and Heritage and Grover Norquist" — two think tanks and a well-connected Republican lobbyist — to make sure its messages get plenty of attention.
"Several times a day, their message is amplified," grumbled the former Democratic standard-bearer, who spent $341 million in the last election cycle to amplify the message that he should be president. "We don't have anything like that."
Now where have we heard this before?
Well, last year we heard it from Democratic operative Rob Stein, creator of a PowerPoint presentation much admired by prominent Democrats, including former White House chief of staff John Podesta, called "The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix." As The New York Times Magazine summarized it, Stein "essentially makes the case that a handful of families — Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors, and others — laid the foundation for a $300 million-per-year network of policy centers, advocacy groups, and media outlets that now wield great influence over the national agenda. The network . . . includes scores of powerful organizations . . . linked to a massive message apparatus, into which Stein lumps everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to Pat Robertson's '700 Club.' "
In 2003, we heard it from Eric Alterman, whose bestselling "What Liberal Media?" claimed that the press, far from tilting leftward, is actually infected with a pervasive right-wing bias. "Conservatives have spent billions . . . to pressure the mainstream media to move rightward," he wrote. "Unbeknownst to millions of Americans . . . liberals are fighting a near hopeless battle in which they are enormously outmatched in most measures."
In 2002, Al Gore declared, "The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party." He indicted several by name. "Fox News Network, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh — there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires . . . . Most of the media has been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks."
If nothing else, the Kerry-Stein-Alterman-Gore-Clinton complaint makes it clear that the paranoid style in American politics is alive and well. Thirty years ago, it was Richard Nixon who fumed at the media and compiled an enemies list. Today it is in the upper ranks of the Democratic Party that unflattering news coverage is blamed on a "conspiracy" and a subversive "fifth column."
But there is a difference. Nixon really did a face an overwhelmingly hostile press corps. Kerry, Gore, and Clinton, by contrast, benefit from a news media that is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, as countless surveys have shown. To cite just one: When a New York Times reporter polled journalists covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention on their presidential preferences, those from around the country favored Kerry over Bush by a ratio of 3 to 1. Among the Washington press corps, the results were even more lopsided — 12 to 1 pro-Kerry. "Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats," the Times story acknowledged. "Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic."
What Kerry and the others object to is not that there are only conservative voices to be heard in media circles these days, but that there are any such voices. The right-of-center Fox News cannot hold a candle to the combined left-of-center output of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and PBS. Scaife, Bradley, and Olin money helps leverage Republican messages, but its impact is dwarfed by the Ford, Rockefeller, Pew, Heinz, Turner, MacArthur, Carnegie, and Soros fortunes. The Washington Times is conservative? Yes, but The Washington Post is liberal — and its circulation is eight times as large.
But for Kerry, Gore, and Clinton, even a few conservative outlets are too many. They grew up in the era before cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet — the age when liberal dominance was unquestioned and conservatives were largely unseen and unheard. Now Democrats have to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and voters don't seem to be buying what they're selling. Is it any wonder so many of them are grumpy?
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Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Boston Globe |
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