U.S. Media Picks a President

by Randolph T. Holhut

Nor does it surprise me to hear that Richard Mellon Scaife (the man who bankrolled the various anti-Clinton enterprises of the past right years) decide to ban Al Gore from the front page of his newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, during the final days of the campaign. After all, a majority of U.S. newspapers endorsed Bush.

It's not surprising to note that Frank Luntz (the Republican pollster who created Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America") does the polling for MSNBC, or that you'll find plenty of writers from Rupert Murdoch's conservative magazine "The Weekly Standard" (David Brooks, Tucker Carlson, Fred Barnes and William Kristol, to name a few) offering their commentary on the tube -- and that in both cases, none of these folks are identified as conservatives.

When was the last time you saw Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bob Herbert or Katha Pollitt on the Sunday political gabfests? Or have seen writers from The Nation or In These Times mixing it up with the usual right-wing hacks on CNN or MSNBC? Or have seen or heard a genuinely left-of-center perspective on any event of importance in the corporate media?

There may be a few people out there who still believe the press is dominated by liberals, but there can't possibly be that many. After seeing the coverage of the 2000 presidential election, no one can seriously make this claim again.

But the problem is not so much conservative bias as it is a bias against challenging the status quo. There is little overt censorship in the news media, but there is plenty of self-censorship. Reporters learn quickly that stories that take on the powerful or threaten the well-being of advertisers will get spiked, and that continuing to produce those kinds of stories will lead to a short and unhappy journalism career. As more and more media outlets are concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the future of independent reporting looks grim.

That's why TV news is filled with fluff and celebrity items, why local newspapers shy away from doing tough stories and why magazines like People are cash machines while magazines like In These Times and The Progressive are teetering on insolvency. Produce corporate-friendly, escapist stories, and you'll be rewarded. Challenge the established order, and get pushed to the margins where few can see or hear what you have to say.

With a news media that's focused on style instead of substance, a lot gets overlooked. If you want to know how George W. Bush and his henchmen got away with stealing an election, look no further than stories that appeared in the so-called liberal news media over the past two months.

Take Gore's focus on the nearly 65,000 ballots that were rejected during machine counts. Had Bush agreed early on that the rejected votes needed to be recounted and perhaps admitted that as governor he had signed a law in Texas mandating hand counts of ballots in close elections, much of the nonsense of the past few weeks might have been avoided.

Instead, Bush's bunch took advantage of the old canard of "objectivity" in the press. James Baker's statements that machine recounts were more accurate than hand counts, or the Bush side's constant refrain that the votes "have been counted, recounted and then counted again" were blindly repeated. Rarely was it pointed out that nearly all of the ballots had only been tabulated by machine and few were examined to see if legal and identifiable votes were cast.

Some in the press think objectivity is served by quoting both sides in an argument. But good reporting is not letting any statement uttered by a public figure go unchallenged. The aphorism told to rookie reporters at Chicago's old City News Service still applies: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Veteran New York political reporter and columnist Tom Wicker told Editor & Publisher magazine a couple of weeks ago that he felt the events in Florida were nothing but a "straight-out, naked power struggle" and that everything else was "baloney." Wicker said the press "didn't make enough of that, instead allowing partisans to make points about how great their cause was."

The conservative pundits that dominate the editorial pages of newspapers and the TV gabfests were shrill and nearly unanimous in their condemnation of Gore as a sore loser who was stealing an election that Bush had won while overlooking the undercounted votes, the many stories of black voters denied poll access, and the still growing margin of victory in the popular vote (nearly 500,000 as this is being written, as states continue their official tallies). Say something loud enough and often enough, and it gets accept as fact. Hey, it worked for Hitler, didn't it?

We know the answer to that question. Sports fans demand truth from the press. Sports reporters are naturally adversarial because they know they are observers and not participants in the game's outcome. They interpret what happened, put it into context, and tell what it means. Those who blindly accept spin don't last long on the sports beat.

In politics, the press thinks it is part of the process, that they are players and not observers. And they always want to be on the winning side. Many in the corporate press decided early on that Gore was a loser, and gave Bush a pass on many character issues (the enthusiastic drug and alcohol use in his twenties and thirties, the missing service time in the Air National Guard, the shady insider business deals) that would have torpedoed any Democrat. That's because truth takes a backseat to backing a winner. And when your bosses demand that approach from you, you write accordingly and reap the rewards for doing so.

Expect to see more, not less, of this kind of reporting in the Bush years. The Wall Street Journal, no friend of liberalism, nailed it in a recent article that described how politics has been transformed into a quest for market share, where competing ideas are de-emphasized and political debate is reduced to easily remembered slogans and catch phrases. Modern political campaigns are essentially media events and the Republicans are Coke and the Democrats are Pepsi.

As politics gets dumbed down, we need smarter reporting. Instead, most of what we see and hear is anything but intelligent. And that's one reason why George W. Bush is president.