Working the refs.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Book Review

What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News By Eric Alterman. Basic Books, 2003. 322 pages. $25.

I was speaking somewhere a couple of months ago--it might have been at the Madison Lions Club--when a member of the audience asked, "Some say the media is conservative; some say it is liberal. Which is it?"

I wish I had the man's name, because I'd send him a copy of Eric Alterman's new book, What Liberal Media?

While I have some problems, big and small, with his book, Alterman does make a strong case that the so-called liberal media (which he annoyingly abbreviates as SCLM) is not so liberal after all.

Some of the damning evidence he adduces is from conservatives themselves, who confess to playing up the liberal charge for partisan political advantage. Alterman quotes William Kristol of The Weekly Standard saying, "I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." Kristol should know. He's everywhere in the media, the soft-spoken voice and twinkly eye of the neoconservative movement. Alterman also cites Rich Bond, who was chair of the Republican Party during the 1992 election. Bond admitted that he tried to "work the refs," as he put it.

Alterman takes this as a point of departure. "The right is working the refs," he writes, "and it's working. Much of the public believes a useful, but unsupportable, myth about the SCLM, and the media itself have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop."

Setting out to clear the field, Alterman disposes of Ann Coulter, author of Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, and Bernard Goldberg, who wrote Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.

He then takes on the influential 1996' Freedom Forum poll of Washington bureau chiefs and Congressional correspondents, which found that 89 percent of them voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Alterman throws all sorts of arguments at this one: voting for Clinton doesn't mean you're a liberal like European social democrats or the American philosopher John Rawls; some voted for Clinton because he was a boomer like them or a policy wonk like them, or a "New Democrat" in favor of the death penalty and ending welfare. On top of all that, Alterman goes after the methodology of the sample itself.

But after all that slogging, he appears to throw in the towel. "Then again, let's not kid ourselves," he says...