What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News by Eric Alterman

From Barnes & Noble

According to Bernard Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, liberals control the media. In fact, that claim has been a popular standard for conservative thinkers and politicians for decades. In What Liberal Media? media columnist Eric Alterman takes the war into the enemy's camp, pursuing an aggressive investigation into the intrinsically conservative nature of the U.S. news. Naming names and lobby groups, he profiles the real newsmakers behind and beyond the cameras.

From the Publisher

The question of whose interests the media protects—and how—has achieved holy-grail-like significance. Is media bias keeping us from getting the whole story? If so, who is at fault? Is it the liberals who are purported to be running the newsrooms, television and radio stations of this country, duping an unsuspecting public into mistaking their party line for news? Or is it the conservatives who have identified media bias as a reliably inflammatory rallying cry around which to consolidate their political base as they cynically “work the refs?” The media has become so pervasive in our lives that regardless of exactly where on the ideological fence you sit, the question of media bias has become all but unavoidable.Most of the criticism (and anger) has so far emanated from the political Right, which has offered us the rather unconvincing argument that a systematic Left bias is destroying the quality of news and debate in our country today. Journalist and historian Eric Alterman begs to differ.What Liberal Media? confronts the question of liberal bias and, in so doing, provides a sharp and utterly convincing assessment of the realities of political bias in the news. In distinct contrast to the conclusions reached by Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly, Alterman finds the media to be, on the whole, far more conservative than liberal, though it is possible to find evidence for both views. The fact that conservatives howl so much louder and more effectively than liberals is one significant reason that big media is always on its guard for “liberal” bias but gives conservative bias a free pass. After reading WhatLiberal Media? you will understand that the real news story of recent years is not whether this newspaper, or that news anchor, is biased but rather to what extent the entire news industry is organized to communicate conservative views and push our politics to the right—regardless of how “liberal” any given reporter may be.

New York Times - Ted Widmer

Alterman is ready for a bar fight, and he comes out swinging. His first targets are Goldberg and Ann Coulter, the acidulous commentator whose mini-skirts and mini-thoughts have ensured her a wide following on the paleolithic end of the political spectrum. Alterman dusts off some of her more outrageous quotations (wishing that Timothy McVeigh had blown up The New York Times, to cite one example), which more or less refute themselves, and then proceeds to the more serious argument that ''the right is working the refs'' the way loudmouthed coaches do -- to gain whatever tactical advantage they can.

In fact, Alterman argues, the bias is hard to find. The Times was hardly soft on the Clinton administration, chasing after Whitewater for years, and The Washington Post has been slouching rightward for some time. Talk radio is Death Valley for the left, and the world of television punditry is not much better. Throughout the book, the idea of a liberal reporter seems a faint anachronism -- like the typewriter or Jimmy Olsen's bow tie -- when contrasted to the disciplined nexus of private foundations, talk shows and dirt-seeking oppo men that the right uses to get out its message. Alterman vividly presents this nether world as something out of Dante's ''Inferno'' -- the trust-funders with deep pockets, like Richard Mellon Scaife; the Internet bottom-feeders who traffic in rumors and half-truths (Matt Drudge); the braying hosts and guests on shows like ''The O'Reilly Factor'' and ''The McLaughlin Group,'' who never shut their mouths to listen to one another (where's the duct tape when you actually need it?).

But it's one thing to rant about the right, and it's another to show tangible proof that democracy is being tampered with. This Alterman sets out to do in his two best chapters, detailing the press's dismissive treatment of Al Gore in 2000 and its indifference to the actual counting of the votes in Florida. Alterman suggests persuasively that the press mollycoddled George W. Bush in the months leading to the election. Another interesting revelation is that the Republicans were poised to launch a ''massive talk radio operation'' to attack the verdict if Gore won the electoral count but lost the popular vote. History turned out differently, as we know, and Gore was excoriated as a sore loser for even questioning the result. By working the refs, the Bush team ended up winning the Super Bowl....

The New Yorker

Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, says that, to the extent that the liberal media still exists, "I work in the middle of it, and so do many of my friends. And guess what? It's filled with right-wingers." His thesis, a response to recent books by the conservatives Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg, is that liberal media outlets take pains to feature opinion from all across the political spectrum (and are in some cases veering rightward); meanwhile, the right-wing media -- a well-funded empire of radio stations, TV shows, and magazines -- pursues an overtly partisan agenda. A polemic is nothing without passion, and Alterman's argumentative vigor is engaging, although his focus sometimes drifts, and he can happily spend an entire paragraph upbraiding Howard Kurtz for having said that William Kristol's being a Mets fan proves him to be "contrarian." Like most media commentators, Alterman probably overestimates the influence of media commentators, but the meticulous care with which his arguments are sourced and footnoted is in commendable contrast to the efforts of some of his more fire-breathing conservative opponents.

Book Magazine

The commercial success achieved by right-wing authors Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg has inspired Alterman, a lefty, to take his own turn at bashing the media. In his second book, the author challenges the notion of a "liberal" media, arguing that the right has been so successful at manipulating the press that political debate in this country has shifted dramatically to the conservative side. Moreover, the right raises huge sums of money to influence that debate and rewards conservative media spokespersons like Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge. Alterman expresses his displeasure with President George W. Bush and attacks a variety of personalities in the administration and among the journalists who cover it, including New York Times reporter Frank Bruni, whose coverage of the Bush campaign Alterman calls "issueless." In fact, Alterman's incessant attacks on his peers are so many and so virulent that the reader may eventually suspect him of being less interested in reporting than in settling scores.

Publishers Weekly

Media bias has been preventing the American public from getting the whole story, says journalist Alterman, and bestselling books like Ann Coulter's Slander and Bernard Goldberg's Bias aren't helping matters. Alterman, who writes the "Stop the Presses" media column for the Nation and an MSNBC Web log, "Altercation," passionately lays out his case in this succinct, abridged reading of his latest book. Along with Coulter and Goldberg, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and George Will come under the gun, too, as Alterman picks apart the problems with today's news media. While it's intriguing to hear him list what he sees as quite grievous offenses by conservative media outlets, Alterman's well-documented research is what makes the book so engaging. Alterman reads this audiobook like a fervent political science or journalism professor might, listing facts and citing reports, then adding his own inflections to emphasize points. A Queens, N.Y., native, Alterman speaks with a slight accent and an even slighter lisp, but this does not detract from his heated, heartfelt performance. Simultaneous release with the Basic hardcover (Forecasts, Jan. 27). (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Daniel Levinson - KLIATT

Alterman and this book got a lot of attention when the hardcover edition was published, joining Al Franken and others in the liberal counterattack against conservative books alleging liberal bias in the media. Alterman's book is among the most carefully researched and argued of the lot, and as media critic for The Nation he is a smart, experienced journalist who makes no bones about being an old-fashioned liberal politically. The book examines what kind of messages really get out in television, print, and radio. He also has chapters about economic and social bias, the 2000 election, "W's World," and ends with an afterword on "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Of course such a book is part of a cultural dialogue at a particular time in history, and many of the names and events discussed have already been succeeded by new media favorites as the debate (at least on cable TV) continues. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Perseus, 357p. notes., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

Do the media lean to the Left or the Right? Bernard Goldberg argued for the Left in his best-selling Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Alterman, media columnist for the Nation and author of Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, counters that the whole idea of a predominantly liberal press is a pernicious myth. Calling for a more open-minded approach to the discussion of media bias, Alterman documents the range of conservative media outlets in all formats, showing that the conservatives far outnumber the small and underfunded liberal media. He further challenges the notion of liberal bias by highlighting the consolidation of major media into the hands of a smaller number of corporate owners, whose focus on profits encourages a conservative slant to news. To support his argument, Alterman relies on recent political history and media transcripts. Readers who have been bombarded by complaints about a too liberal press will welcome Alterman's articulate counterargument. Both academic and public libraries will want to add this book to their journalism collections.-Judy Solberg, George Washington Univ. Libs., Washington, DC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Journalist Alterman disproves with vigor the notion of news organizations’ left-wing bias, only to leave the more important question hanging: why ignorance trumps ideology. The author believes that the media should be watchdogs: aggressive and independent in securing news, questioning of authority, frank about any self-interest involved. Given his definition of liberals as those who believe in "a steeply progressive income tax, to say nothing of making universally available, high-quality health care, education, housing, public parks, beaches, and last but not least, political power," it doesn't take much to trot out the media opposition. The influential, or at least conspicuous, conservative pundits Alterman identifies range from the alarmist Ann Coulter to the paleoconservative William Safire, with all manner of the frothing Michael Kelly and the egregious Cokie Roberts in between, all of them selling an ideological agenda when not shoveling forth errors and insults, partial or misleading truths. Nor do these pundits own their last words; those are the property of editors, publishers, producers, and advertisers (witness the News Hour/Archer Daniels Midland embarrassment) geared toward a market whose heart isn't in hard news. Conservatives and liberals alike can hurl examples of bias at each other all day long, but it’s understood that "the White House depends on the media to make its case to the public; the media needs the White House to fill their airtime." Alterman (Sound and Fury, 1992, etc.) hits the nub when he writes, "Most reporters are ignorant about most things"; all too often, journalists don't have an inkling of what they are covering, especially regarding national politics(see Election 2000) and international affairs (from the Balkans to Iraq, few ask the hard questions). Regrettably, the author doesn't pursue this fundamental point. Nonetheless, a sobering reminder that TV long ago abandoned serious journalism and that watchdogs and skeptics are thin on the ground in all media--bad news for those who believe a vibrant, informative press is one of the bedrocks of democracy. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow & Nesbit

What People Are Saying

E. J. Dionne Jr.
Whether you agree with it or argue with it, you'll be grateful you read it. (E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Why Americans Hate Politics and They Only Look Dead)

Senator John Kerry
. . . crisp, quick, engaging, and witty. . . will interest anyone eager to tackle the next generation of political challenges. (Senator John F. Kerry, D-MA)

Product Details

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• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Only a liberal would be dumb enough to title a book, What Liberal Media? Listen to just about anyone and the answer is obvious: "What, are you stupid? Just pick up a newspaper or turn on your TV." Should that fail to convince, bemusement can turn to anger, or at best, pity, as in "There are none so blind as those who will not see." America's argument about media bias features just two points of view. The right argues that the media is biased toward leftists. The other side responds, to quote David Broder, "dean" of the Washington press corps, "There just isn't enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble."1 The idea that the media might, for reasons of ownership, economics, class, or outside pressure, actually be more sympathetic to conservative causes than to liberal ones is widely considered to be simply beyond the pale.

Social scientists talk about "useful myths," stories we all know are not necessarily true, but that we choose to believe anyway because they seem to offer confirmation of what we already know (which raises the question, if we already know it, why the story?). Think of the wholly fictitious but illustrative story about little George Washington and his inability to lie about that cherry tree. For conservatives, and even more many journalists, the "liberal media" is just that: a myth, to be certain, but a useful one. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the nation. Alas, if pigs could fly._._._.

Republicans of all stripes have done quite well for themselves during the last five decades fulminating about the liberal cabal/progressive thought-police who spin, supplant, and sometimes suppress the news we all consume. Indeed, it's not only conservatives who find this whipping boy to be an irresistible target. Dwight David Eisenhower received one of the biggest ovations of his life when, at the 1964 Republican convention, he derided the "sensation-seeking columnists and commentators" who sought to undermine the Republican Party's efforts to improve the nation.2 The most colorful example of this art form, however, is probably a toss-up between two quips penned by William Safire when he was a White House speechwriter for Vice President Spiro Agnew, who denounced both the "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the "effete corps of impudent snobs" seeking to sink the nation's morale.3 His boss, Richard Nixon (who had been Ike's VP), usually held his tongue in public, but complained obsessively in private to the evangelist Billy Graham of "a terrible liberal Jewish clique" that "totally dominates the media" and "erodes our confidence, our strength."4 Just about everyone wants to get in on the fun. Even Bill Clinton whined to Rolling Stone that he did not get "one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press."5 The presidency's current occupant, George W. Bush, continues this tradition, complaining that the media "are biased against conservative thought."6 On a trip to Maine in January 2001, he quite conspicuously carried a copy of the best-selling book, Bias, by Bernard Goldberg, as if to the give the so-called "liberal media"-hereafter, SCLM-a presidential thumb in the eye.7

But while some conservatives actually believe their own grumbles, the smart ones don't. They know mau-mauing the other side is a just a good way to get their ideas across-or perhaps to prevent the other side from getting a fair hearing for theirs. On occasion, honest conservatives admit this. Rich Bond, then the chair of the Republican Party, complained during the 1992 election, "I think we know who the media want to win this election-and I don't think it's George Bush."8 The very same Rich Bond also noted during the very same election, however, "There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media] ._._._. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."9 Bond is hardly alone. That the SCLM were biased against the administration of Ronald Reagan is an article of faith among Republicans. Yet James Baker, perhaps the most media-savvy of them, owned up to the fact that any such complaint was decidedly misplaced. "There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don't think we had anything to complain about," he explained to one writer.10 Patrick Buchanan, among the most conservative pundits and presidential candidates in the republic's history, found that he could not identify any allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential candidacies. "I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage-all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that,"11 the aspiring American ayatollah cheerfully confessed during the 1996 campaign. And even William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America, has come clean on this issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."12 Nevertheless Kristol apparently feels no compunction about exploiting and reinforcing ignorant prejudices of his own constituency. In a 2001 subscription pitch to conservative potential subscribers of his Rupert Murdoch-funded magazine, the Weekly Standard, Kristol complained, "The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there's too much liberal bias._._._. There's too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes."13 (It's a wonder he left out "Too much hypocrisy.")

In recent times, the right has ginned up its "liberal media" propaganda machine. Books by both Ann Coulter, a blond bombshell pundette, and Bernard Goldberg, former CBS News producer, have topped the best-seller lists, stringing together such a series of charges that, well, it's amazing neither one thought to accuse "liberals" of using the blood of conservative children for extra flavor in their soy-milk decaf lattes. While extremely popular with the media they attack, both books are so shoddily written and "researched" that they pretty much refute themselves. Their danger derives less from the authors' respective allegations than the "where there's smoke, there's fire" impression they inspire. In fact, barely any of the major allegations in either book stands up to more than a moment's scrutiny. The entire case is a lie, and, yes, in many instances, a slander. Although I abhor the methods of both authors, I do not feel they can go unanswered. Ideas, particularly bad ones, have consequences. The myth of the "liberal media" empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore. However immodest my goal, I aim to change that.

I first met Ann Coulter in 1996 when we were both hired to be pundits on the new cable news station, MSNBC. Still just a right-wing congressional aide, she had been hired without even a hint of journalistic experience but with a mouth so vicious she made her fellow leggy blond pundit, Laura Ingraham, look and sound like Mary Tyler Moore in comparison. Coulter was eventually fired when she attacked a disabled Vietnam veteran on the air, screaming, "People like you caused us to lose that war."14 But this was just one of many incidents where she had leaped over the bounds of good taste into the kind of talk that is usually reserved for bleachers or bar fights. In her columns, published in one of the most extreme of all conservative publications, Human Events, she regularly referred to the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, as a "pervert, liar, and a felon" and "a flim-flam artist." She termed the first lady to be "pond scum" and "white trash"15 and the late Pamela Harriman a "whore." Coulter said these things all the while appearing on air in dresses so revealing they put one in mind of Sharon Stone in the film Basic Instinct. The greater Coulter's fame, the more malevolent grew her hysteria. In her 1998 book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, she wrote, "In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he 'did it,' even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate."16 Such was the wisdom of the alleged "constitutional scholar" whose work George Will quoted on ABC's This Week. (Will is not very particular about his sources. I counted exactly one work of history in Coulter's copious footnotes. Coulter has also been accused of plagiarism by a former colleague, but denies the charge.)17

Shortly after 9/11, Coulter became famous again when she suggested, in a column published by National Review Online, after seeing anti-American demonstrators in Arab nations, that we "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."18 Coulter's column was dropped by the magazine, but not because the editors objected to its content. Editor Jonah Goldberg explained, "We ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty." (Coulter had called the editors "girly boys.")19 Coulter remained unbowed. At a meeting of the National Political Action Conference, speaking of the young American who converted to militant Islam and fought for the Taliban, Coulter advised, "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors."20 She also joked about the proposed murder of the U.S. secretary of transportation, Norm Mineta.21

In her second book-length primal scream, published in the summer of 2002, Coulter compared Katie Couric of the Today show to Eva Braun. (She would later add Joseph Goebbels after Couric challenged her in an interview.) She termed Christie Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a "dimwit" and a "birdbrain." Sen. Jim Jeffords is a "half-wit." Gloria Steinem is a "termagent" and "deeply ridiculous figure," who "had to sleep" with a rich liberal to fund Ms. magazine.22 But the errors are even more egregious than the insults, and her footnotes are, in many significant cases, a sham.23 The good folks at the American Prospect's Web log "Tapped" went to the trouble of compiling Coulter's errors chapter by chapter. The sheer weight of these, coupled with their audacity, demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a journalistic culture that allows her near a microphone, much less a printing press.24 (If you doubt this, put down this book and log on right now to www.whatliberalmedia.com, and follow the clicks to Appendix One.)25

Coulter's view of the U.S. media can be summed up as follows: "American journalists commit mass murder without facing the ultimate penalty, I think they are retarded." In the New York Observer, published in one of the two cities attacked on 9/11, Coulter joked about how wonderful it would have been if Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times building and murdered all of its inhabitants. Apparently nothing-not even the evocation, serious or not, of the mass murder of journalists-could turn Coulter's love affair with the SCLM sour.

For such comments, she is celebrated and rewarded. While promoting Slander, Coulter was booked on Today, Crossfire (as both a guest and guest host), Hardball, The Big Story with John Gibson, and countless other cable and radio programs. She was lovingly profiled in Newsday, the New York Observer, and the New York Times Sunday Styles page, while also enjoying a seat at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner as a guest of the Boston Globe. She was even invited on ABC's Good Morning America as an election analyst in November 2002. In the Wall Street Journal-a newspaper that had actually been destroyed by terrorists, and whose reporter, Daniel Pearl, had been murdered by them-Melik Kaylan defended her comments in Coulter-like fashion. He argued, "We have been programmed to think that such impassioned outrage, and outrageousness, are permissible only on the left from counter-culture comedians or exponents of identity politics." He also compared Coulter's alleged "humor" to that of Lenny Bruce, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers. Too bad, therefore, as Charles Pierce pointed out, the conservative media darling has yet to be "arrested and jailed for what she said (Lenny Bruce), prosecuted in federal court (Angela Davis), or shot to ribbons in her bed (the Black Panthers)."26

Bernard Goldberg's book Bias suffers from many of the same weaknesses as Coulter's, though he lacks her colorful flair for murderous invective. Still Bias proved a smashing success. The New York Times's publishing columnist, Martin Arnold, termed its sales to be "the most astonishing publishing event in the last 12 months."27 Indeed, with its publisher claiming more than 440,000 copies in print, the book's sales figures alone are taken by many to be evidence of the truth of its argument.28 In many ways, the conservative side was hardly better served in its arguments by Goldberg than by Coulter. To those who do not already share Goldberg's biases, his many undocumented, exaggerated assertions have the flavor of self-parody rather than reasoned argument. Among these are such statements as: "Everybody to the right of Lenin is a 'right-winger' as far as media elites are concerned." Opposition to the flat tax, he claims, comes from the same "dark region that produces envy and the seemingly unquenchable liberal need to wage class warfare."29 Roughly 72 of the 232 pages of Bias are devoted to attacks or score-settling with Dan Rather, whom Goldberg believes to have ruined his career. "If CBS News were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three-quarters of the producers and 100 percent of the vice-presidents would be Dan's bitches," Goldberg says.30 Much of the rest of Bias consists of blasts at unnamed liberals who are accused of exaggerating data and manipulating the truth for their own purposes. How strange, therefore, that Goldberg seeks to make his case with statements about: "America's ten-trillion-page tax code," tuition fees that are "about the same as the cost of the space shuttle," and Laurence Tribe's "ten million"31 appearances on CBS News during the 1980s.32

Taking the conservative ideology of wealthy white male victimization to hitherto-unimagined heights, Goldberg employs an extended Mafia metaphor to describe his departure from CBS. He speaks of having broken his pledge of "omerta"33 by writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking his colleagues. "So what happened?" he writes. "Well, as Tony Soprano might put it to his old pal Pussy Bompensiero in the Bada Bing! Lounge: Bernie G. opened his big mouth to the wrong people-and he got whacked."34 You believe this heartbreaking tale until you discover that CBS had every right to fire him for violating the terms of his contract by attacking the network news program in a public forum. Instead, his superiors found him a comfortable job where he was allowed to quietly qualify for a higher pension. (On The Sopranos, and indeed, in most Mafia lore, the term "to whack" carries rather different connotations, as evidenced by Big Pussy's undisturbed slumber with "the fishes.")

During the course of over 220 pages of complaining, Goldberg never bothers to systematically prove the existence of liberal bias in the news, or even define what he means by the term. About as close as we get is: "I said out loud what millions of TV news viewers all over America know and have been complaining about for years: that too often, Dan and Peter and Tom and a lot of their foot soldiers don't deliver the news straight, that they have a liberal bias, and that no matter how often the network stars deny it, it is true."35 A few of his examples, such as those involving corporate self-censorship in the event that a certain segment might offend the audience or advertisers, or the preference for interviewees with blond hair and blue eyes over people of color, actually serve to make the opposite case. With a keen eye to his likely audience of conservative talk-show hosts and book-buyers, the author simply assumes the existence of a liberal bias in the media to be an undisputable fact.

This same undocumented assumption characterized the conservative celebration of the book. The editors of the Wall Street Journal thundered: "There are certain facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute. One of these-that there is a liberal tilt in the media._._._. "36 U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo added, in praise of Bias, that "the reluctance of the news business to hold seminars and conduct investigations of news bias is almost legendary."37 Glenn Garvin, television critic of the Miami Herald, added, "That newsrooms are mostly staffed by political liberals is pretty much beyond dispute, although a few keep trying to argue the point." That newspaper's executive editor, Tom Fielder, was said to be so impressed by Bias that he invited Goldberg to lunch with top members of his staff. He told Garvin, "I hate to say there's a political correctness that guides us, but I think there is. We tend to give more credibility to groups on the liberal side of the spectrum than on the conservative side."38

If, in an alternative universe, all of Goldberg's claims somehow turned out to be justified, the crux of his argument would nevertheless constitute a remarkably narrow indictment. Goldberg did not set out to prove a liberal bias across the entire media, nor even across all television news. He concerned himself only with the evening news broadcasts, and not even with politics, but with social issues. Moreover, he appears to have done little research beyond recounting his own experiences and parroting the complaints of a conservative newsletter published by Brent Bozell's Media Research Center.39 It is hard to see what so excited conservative readers about the book. The broadcasts in question represent a declining share of viewers' attention, and, increasingly, an old and, at least from advertisers' standpoint, undesirable audience. It is possible that these particular news programs-if not their very format-will not survive the retirement ages of the current generation of anchors.40

Goldberg appears to consider this fact. However, he attributes the relative decline in viewership of the network nightly news to viewer unhappiness with the widespread liberal bias he clams to have uncovered. "It's as if the Berlin Wall had come down," he explains. "But instead of voting with their feet, Americans began voting with their remote control devices. They haven't abandoned the news. Just the news people they no longer trust." "How else can we account for Bill O'Reilly and The O'Reilly Factor on The Fox News Channel?_._._. As far as I'm concerned, the three people Bill owes so much of his success to are Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather."41

The logic of the above argument is genuinely difficult to fathom. Goldberg is correct to note that all three networks have seen a significant decline in their ratings for their news programs. But so has just about everything on network programming, due, quite obviously, to the enormous rise in viewer choice-the result of the replacement of a three-network television universe with one that features hundreds of choices on cable and satellite TV and the Internet. Viewership for all four networks-ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox-during the ratings period September 24, 2001, to March 3, 2002, for instance, made up only 43 percent of TV watchers, compared with more than twice that percentage for just three networks two decades earlier.42

Still the network news programs' numbers remained impressive. The combined audience of the three network news programs is well over thirty million Americans, and better than fifteen times the number tuning into Mr. O'Reilly. It is also more than ten times the combined total prime-time audience for Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC.43 These ratios render Goldberg's logic entirely nonsensical. Had he, or anyone related to the book, had enough respect for his readers to bother with even ten minutes of research, this claim would have never made it into print.

Not all of Goldberg's arguments are quite as easy to disprove, but most are no less false or misleading. One of the claims that many critics and television interviewers have considered the strongest in the book was the one the author credited with having inspired his initial interest in the topic:

not because of my conservative views but because what I saw happening violated my liberal sense of fair play. Why, I kept wondering, do we so often identify conservatives in our stories, yet rarely identify liberals? Over the years, I began to realize that this need to identify one side but not the other is a central component of liberal bias. There are right-wing Republicans and right-wing Christians and right-wing radio talk show hosts. The only time we journalists use the term "left-wing" is if we're talking about a part on an airplane.

Goldberg illustrates his point with an example taken from the Clinton impeachment proceedings, during which, he claims, Peter Jennings identified senators as they came to sign their names in the oath book. According to Goldberg, Jennings described Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as a "very determined conservative," Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania as "one of the younger members of the Senate, Republican, very determined conservative," and Bob Smith of New Hampshire as "another very, very conservative Republican" but did not describe liberals accordingly. Goldberg also complained that CBS identifies the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon as a "noted law professor" while Phyllis Schlafly is a "conservative spokeswoman." Rush Limbaugh, says Goldberg, is the "conservative radio talk show host" but Rosie O'Donnell is not described as the liberal TV talk show host. "Robert Bork is the 'conservative' judge. But liberal Laurence Tribe, who must have been on CBS Evening News ten million times in the 1980s," is identified simply as a "Harvard law professor."44

Well, it would be interesting if true. And many of even the sharpest SCLM critics of Goldberg's book assumed it to be true, perhaps out of the mistaken belief that he must have done at least this much research. Both Howard Kurtz and Jeff Greenfield failed to challenge it on CNN. Jonathan Chait accepted it in his extremely critical cover story on the book in the New Republic but then went on to explain why, aside from liberal bias, it might be the case.45 And the then-dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Tom Goldstein, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, mocked Goldberg's ad hominem claims but nevertheless credited Goldberg for "get[ting] down to specifics ._._._ [that] have the ring of truth" on this point.46

In fact, all were overly generous. Goldberg presents no testable evidence and his arguments bear little relationship to the truth. At a 2002 book-store appearance broadcast on C-Span, a political science professor asked Goldberg something almost no television interviewer had bothered to inquire: Did he have any systematic data to back up this point? The author scoffed at the very idea of evidence. "I didn't want this to be written from a social scientist point of view," Goldberg explained. "I have total confidence that the point here is accurate."

Another audience member then challenged him on this point and here, Goldberg got a bit testy:

Let me say this. And I want to say this as clearly as I can. You are dead wrong. Dead wrong. Not even close about Teddy Kennedy. You have not, almost every time they mention his name, heard "liberal." I will say this-you have heard the word "liberal" almost never mentioned when they say his name, on the evening newscasts. They just don't. That part-I mean you gave me an easy one, and I appreciate that. It doesn't happen.47

Goldberg seems to think that such statements become true by emphatic repetition. In fact, they are testable and it is Bernard Goldberg who is "dead wrong." On the small, almost insignificant point of whom Peter Jennings identified with what label on a single broadcast, Goldberg's point is a partial, and deliberately misleading, half-truth. As the liberal Daily Howler Web site pointed out, "the incident occurred on January 7, 1999, and Jennings did not identify 'every conservative' as the senators signed the oath book." He identified only three of them as such, failing to offer the label of conservative to such stalwarts as Senators Gramm, Hatch, Helms, Lott, Mack, Thurmond, Lugar, Stevens, Thompson, and Warner.48 Most of the labels had nothing to do with politics and were peppered with personal asides about a given senator's age, interests, or personality. On the larger point regarding a liberal bias in the labeling of conservatives, but not liberals, Goldberg could hardly be more wrong, even using the very examples he proposes. For instance, Ted Kennedy does not appear on the news with much frequency, but during the first six months of 2001, when he did, it was almost always accompanied by the word "liberal."49 As for the "million" respectful references to Laurence Tribe that appeared without the appendage "liberal," the indefatigable Howler checked those as well. According to Lexis, Howler found, Tribe has appeared on the CBS Evening News just nine times since 1993, almost always identified with a liberal label. On one occasion, May 14, 1994, CBS News even used Tribe and Robert Bork together, described as "legal scholars from both ends of the political spectrum."50

The above anecdotes are reinforced by some careful research on the topic by Geoffrey Nunberg of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and its department of linguistics. The results of these are reprinted in Appendix Two, available at www.whatliberalmedia.com, and I urge you to examine them if you believe Goldberg has even a shred of credibility remaining.

Given the success of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, New York Post, American Spectator, Weekly Standard, New York Sun, National Review, Commentary, and so on, no sensible person can dispute the existence of a "conservative media." The reader might be surprised to learn that neither do I quarrel with the notion of a "liberal media." It is tiny and profoundly underfunded compared to its conservative counterpart, but it does exist. As a columnist for the Nation and an independent Weblogger for MSNBC.com, I work in the middle of it, and so do many of my friends. And guess what? It's filled with right-wingers. Unlike most of the publications named above, liberals, for some reason, feel compelled to include the views of the other guy on a regular basis in just the fashion that conservatives abhor.

Take a tour from a native: New York magazine, in the heart of liberal country, chose as its sole national correspondent the right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson. During the 1990s, the New Yorker-the bible of sophisticated urban liberalism-chose as its Washington correspondents the Clinton/Gore hater Michael Kelly and the soft, DLC neo-conservative Joe Klein. At least half of the "liberal New Republic" is actually a rabidly neoconservative magazine (see chapter 3) and has been edited in recent years by the very same Michael Kelly, as well as the conservative liberal hater Andrew Sullivan. Its rival on the "left," the Nation, happily published the free-floating liberal hater Christopher Hitchens until he chose to resign, and also invites Alexander Cockburn to attack liberals with morbid predictability. The Atlantic Monthly-a mainstay of Boston liberalism-even chose the apoplectic Kelly as its editor, who then proceeded to add a bunch of Weekly Standard writers plus Christopher Hitchens to Atlantic's anti-liberal stable. What is the hysterically funny but decidedly reactionary _P. J. O'Rourke doing in both the Atlantic and the liberal Rolling Stone? Why does liberal Vanity Fair choose to publish a hagiographic Annie Liebowitz portfolio of Bush administration officials designed, apparently, to invoke notions of Greek and Roman gods? Why does the liberal New York Observer alternate National Review's Richard Brookheiser with the Joe McCarthy-admiring columnist, Nicholas von Hoffman-both of whom appear alongside editorials that occasionally mimic the same positions taken downtown by the editors of the Wall Street Journal. On the Web, the tabloid-style liberal Web site Salon gives free reign to the McCarthyite impulses of both Andrew Sullivan and David Horowitz. The neoliberal Slate also regularly publishes both Sullivan and Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard and has even opened its pixels to such conservative evildoers as Charles Murray and Elliott Abrams. (The reader should know I am not objecting to the inclusion of conservatives in the genuinely liberal component of the media. In fact, I welcome them. I'd just like to see some reciprocity on the other side.)

Move over to the mainstream publications and broadcasts often labeled "liberal" and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal dominance becomes. The liberal New York Times op-ed page features the work of the unreconstructed Nixonite William Safire and for years accompanied him with the firebreathing-if-difficult-to-understand neocon A. M. Rosenthal. Current denizen Bill Keller also writes regularly from a soft, DLC neoconservative perspective. Why was then-editorial page editor, now executive editor, Howell Raines one of Bill Clinton's most vocal adversaries during his entire presidency?51 Why is this alleged bastion of liberalism, on the very morning I wrote these words, offering words of praise and encouragement to George W. Bush and John Ashcroft for invoking the hated Taft-Hartley legislation on behalf of shipping companies, following a lock-out of their West Coast workers?52 (Has the Wall Street Journal editorial page ever, in its entire history, taken the side of American workers in a labor dispute?) It would later endorse for re-election the state's Republican/Conservative governor, George Pataki, over his capable, if unexciting, liberal Democratic African-American opponent, Carl McCall. The Washington Post editorial page, which is considered less liberal than the Times but liberal nevertheless, is just swarming with conservatives, from Mr. Kelly to George Will to Robert Novak to Charles Krauthammer, among many more. On the morning before I finally let go of the draft manuscript of this book, the paper's lead editorial is endorsing the president's plan for a "pre-emptive" war against Iraq.53 The op-ed page was hardly less abashed in its hawkishness. A careful study by Michael Massing published in the Nation found, "Collectively, its editorials, columns and Op-Eds have served mainly to reinforce, amplify and promote the Administration's case for regime change. And, as the house organ for America's political class, the paper has helped push the debate in the Administration's favor._._._."54 If you wish to include CNN on your list of liberal media-I don't, but many conservatives do-then you had better find a way to explain the near ubiquitous presence of the attack dog Robert Novak, along with those of neocon virtuecrat William Bennett, National Review's Kate O'Beirne, National Review's Jonah Goldberg, the Weekly Standard's David Brooks, and Tucker Carlson. This is to say nothing of the fact that among CNN's most frequent guests are Ann Coulter and the anti-American telepreacher Pat Robertson. Care to include ABC News? Again, I don't but, if you wish, how do you deal with the fact that the only ideological commentator on its Sunday interview show is the hardline conservative George Will? Or how about the fact that its only explicitly ideological reporter is the deeply journalistically challenged conservative crusader John Stossel? How to explain the entire career of Cokie Roberts, who never met a liberal to whom she could not condescend? What about Time and Newsweek? In the former, we have Mr. Krauthammer holding forth and in the latter Mr. Will.

I could go on almost indefinitely here, but the point is clear. Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point here is that even the genuine liberal media is not so liberal. And it is no match-either in size, ferocity, or commitment-for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

A Tom Tomorrow cartoon makes this point more cogently that I can in just four panels simply by (implicitly) asking readers to undergo a thought experiment. What if there really were a "liberal media"? Imagine, "an expansive network of left-wing think thanks which are of course bankrolled by secretive left-wing financiers seeking to advance their radical agenda." Now imagine "blatantly left-wing cable news networks and op-ed pages that then promote (left-wing) ideas relentlessly." Had enough? What about "angry liberals" debating these left-wing proposals with weak, mealy-mouthed conservatives on the Sunday talk shows? Want more? How about an entire universe of left-wing talk radio hosts spending endless hours devoting themselves to hammering these left-wing notions into the heads of tens of millions of listeners across the land? Why, poor President Bush and Vice President Cheney wouldn't have a chance.55

But to divide the media into their conservative, liberal, or centrist aspects misses a larger point and can do more to obscure than illuminate. The media make up a vast and unruly herd of independent beasts. Given their number and variety, it can be difficult for anyone to speak accurately about all of them simultaneously. Can one usefully compare Thomas Friedman to Larry Flynt? What about Garry Wills and Matt Drudge? Charlie Rose and Jerry Springer? Bill Moyers and Bill O'Reilly? Does Foreign Affairs share a single subscriber with the National Enquirer? Indeed, even the New York Times and the New York Post are not really in the same business. They have differing audiences, differing mandates, and differing professional standards, thank goodness. Marshall McLuhan was wrong, or at least woefully inexact: The medium is only the message if you're not paying close attention. *

Perhaps the most frequently made argument in defense of the SCLM thesis is the populist one. In a letter to the New Republic, for instance, Bernard Goldberg wrote, "Let's assume I'm dead wrong in my book, that there is no liberal bias in the big-time media. Then I can be easily dismissed. But what about the millions and millions of Americans-including many liberals-who think I'm right ._._. Are they all stupid? Or delusional? Are they under some kind of mass hypnosis, doing the dirty work of right-wing nuts who are pulling the strings? These strike me as important questions."56

According to a September 2002 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Americans questioned believe the media are "too liberal."57 This is an even smaller percentage of Americans than voted for George W. Bush. But even so, it hardly constitutes any form of normative proof or evidence. (Thirteen percent believe the media are biased toward conservatives.) Moreover the "millions and millions of people believe" is not a terribly convincing argument no matter what. Millions also believe in ghosts, extra-terrestrial visitations, and Osama bin Laden's promise of seventy-two virgins. That "millions and millions" of people think Goldberg is right about the media is likely an indication that much of what the public sees and reads confirms their belief that liberal bias does exist. Or it could mean that most media reporters believe that a great percentage of Americans share this view and so don't wish to confuse them.

Conservatives, lest we forget, are much more energetic and better-funded complainers about media bias than are liberals. They are extremely vocal and well-organized in their pressure tactics, and they've done an impressive job over the years in convincing many people that any view that does not comport with a conservative ideological viewpoint is by definition "liberal." In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a four-fold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But the evidence, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."58

The right is working the refs. 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. As the economist/pundit Paul Krugman observes of Republican efforts to bully the media into accepting the party's Orwellian arguments about Social Security privatization: "The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla, much of the media-fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of "balance"-won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown."59

No single work can compensate for the enormous advantage conservatives enjoy in their fight with liberals to control the fate of American politics. But if people are willing to examine the question of media bias in an open-minded fashion, perhaps we can even up the sides a bit.

Read a Sample Chapter

Introduction

What I Saw at the Devolution

This work is not designed to set forth novel or startling political doctrines. It is intended rather as a report on the fundamental enterprise of reexamination and self-criticism which liberalism has undergone in the last decade. The leaders in this enterprise have been the wiser men of an older generation. But its chief beneficiaries have been my own contemporaries; and its main consequence, I believe, has been to create a new and distinct political generation.

—Arthur Schlesinger, Opening words of The Vital Center, 1949

A SPECIAL DAY

"Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." It should have been no surprise that, try as I might, I couldn't get this Noel Coward ditty out of my head. Washington, D.C.'s dog days of summer have been legendary since the swamp was first declared our nation's capital as the bastard child of a constitutional compromise—and the summer of 1997 was no exception. Search as I might, however, I found few canines and even fewer foreigners as the temperature rose to oppressive levels. Instead, looking around the South Lawn of the White House, I saw a very different—though no less peculiar—menagerie braving Washington's heat and humidity on this most August day.

    If I had not known better, I would almost have thought it was a heat-induced mirage. Striding out of the White House through a flag-bordered path and headed toward a platform on the South Lawn,not arm in arm but close, were the then opposing leaders of American political power: Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. It reminded me of the comic books of my childhood, when DC Comics' Batman and Marvel Comics' Spiderman would team up, Superman would battle Muhammad Ali, or all the superheroes would gather together for a "special" issue that every kid just had to have. Along with Clinton and Gingrich on the platform in front of me, and certainly even hotter than I was because of the powerful camera lights trained in their direction, were Vice President Al Gore, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Budget Chairman John Kasich, and dozens of members of Congress from both parties. They had come together to end nearly three decades of wanton fiscal insanity in Washington and sign the first balanced budget in a generation.

    Since the moment I had started my job as Vice President Gore's senior speechwriter two months earlier, the push for a balanced budget had been at the center of my work. "Today is the reason I came to the White House," I wrote in my diary the day the budget deal was first announced. The provisions of the agreement would have a real impact on the millions of Americans who would benefit from the lower interest rates that would result from the balanced budget, from the plan's tax cut for middle-class families, from the health insurance it provided for low-income children, and from the college tuition assistance it offered. On top of all this, the achievement of a balanced budget after decades of debate and false starts was an important milestone for the country and for the New Democrat brand of thinking that Clinton had brought to the White House. I had come to Washington to make a difference. Now, the day after my 22nd birthday and less than two months since I had graduated from college, I was, Forrest Gump-like, standing in a sacred spot on a truly historic day.

    But gnawing at my pride was a profound disquietude. At first I couldn't identify its source. The event was proceeding almost exactly as planned. Logistical preparations had begun days earlier in the West Wing basement office of Communications Director Ann Lewis. There, every last detail was haggled out—from the programs (parchment embossed with the presidential seal) to the invitees (over one thousand guests) to the music (answering a demand for "patriotic music," one meeting participant was forced to defend the choice of the Marine Band. "The Marine Band is `the President's Own,'" she sputtered. "They're about as American as you can get—and they're pretty wonderful!"). A top White House official poked her head in on her way out on the town that Friday evening and made sure the staff understood the significance of what we were doing. "This is the president's day," she directed. "Let's make it special for him."

    Although the show was proceeding as planned, my uneasiness grew steadily stronger. The day was bigger than even the president of the United States. The assembled potentates had come to lower the curtain on something larger than three decades of budget deficits. Along with its specific importance, the balanced budget had a symbolic significance as well. Though I didn't realize it just then, I was witnessing the end of the political history of twentieth-century America. As historian John Lukacs has pointed out, internationally, the twentieth century really lasted from Franz Ferdinand's assassination and the beginning of World War I in 1914 to the moment when East Europeans tore apart the Iron Curtain with their bare hands and ended the Cold War in 1989. In that "short century," the forces of democracy and freedom faced off against monarchy, fascism, and communism—and emerged triumphant. Similarly, American politics of the twentieth century lasted from August 1910, when former President Theodore Roosevelt unveiled his New Nationalism vision of big government, to August 1997, when President Bill Clinton acknowledged that expanding centralized, top-down, bureaucratic government was a thing of the past.

    It is no accident that these events occurred when they did. Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin, who put the New Nationalism into practice, lived in a time when centralized, assembly line factories were the cutting edge. They defined Americans' thinking about how the world should be ordered and structured. Bill Clinton came to power at a moment when this world was rapidly retreating and being replaced by a New Economy that was—perhaps above all else—intrinsically skeptical of centralized power and institutions, including government as Americans have come to know it. Clinton's signing of the balanced budget was a recognition of the awesome power the global financial markets now have in shaping American prosperity; it sent a clear message to Americans that government would live within its means, abiding by the same rules as the middle class; but most of all it made clear that the old, traditional choices about government had stopped being viable. Democratic big government programs and huge Republican tax giveaways—both types of government by "hot check"—were no longer live options.

    As the ceremony went on, I began to realize why I was so anxious. When I was very young, my parents ran a small theater company in Los Angeles. I had grown up backstage, memorizing all the actors' parts and knowing when the audience would laugh far before they had any inkling of an impending guffaw. This predictability gave me comfort. Now, as the budget signing dragged on, an idea gnawed at me: a page was turning—and no one had their lines for the next act. In the years since that hot summer of 1997, politics has stumbled and bumbled along, without moving forward. The new lines still have not been written. This is the unfinished business of American politics.

A CRISIS OF THE OLD ORDER

Noticing the rest of my White House colleagues, and trying desperately to fit in and to avoid passing out, I took the lead of the men and doffed my suit jacket, slinging it ever so casually over my shoulder. I strained—unsuccessfully—to keep my mind from drifting during the interminable speeches. Watching the behavior of the assembled crowd, an observer might not have realized that this was such a crucial new beginning for the president, his party, and the nation. Over there was Press Secretary Mike McCurry sharing a laugh with a couple other staffers under the shade of a gnarled old tree. There was one of my colleagues, in his late 20s and—like Thomas Hobbes' life in a state of nature—"nasty, brutish, and short," sidling up to a pretty summer intern. There was a cluster of staffers from the First Lady's Office—Hillaryland, they called it—folding their programs into makeshift fans. And every so often, people would interrupt whatever they were doing to glance over at the made-for-TV production taking place before them.

    It was indeed a special day for President Clinton—one that no one could have foreseen when he began his campaign for the White House. Running for president in 1992, Clinton had found a country gripped by a crisis of the old order. Confronted by the demise of the Cold War and the final death throes of the comfortable post-World War II economic arrangements, Americans felt certain of little more than decline—in their own standard of living, in the nation's economic well-being and social fabric, in their hopes for their children's future.

    It was clearly a moment for creative, innovative leadership. But as the 1990s began, both parties were AWOL. The Republican Party gloried in the creed of greed and viewed crime and welfare as wedge issues to be exploited rather than problems to be solved. It had raised taxes on the middle class and presided over an era of dwindling growth. Education was an afterthought and Republican economic strategy was largely limited to the notion of rewarding those privileged with wealth and praying that their leftover trickle would sustain the nation.

    At the same time, Americans saw a Democratic Party that had rejected its historic role as the tribune of the middle class. Many Democrats downplayed traditional values of work, family, responsibility, faith—labeling them the province of the Republicans. Paying more attention to rights than to responsibilities, to criminals than to victims, to bureaucrats than to entrepreneurs, to America's international sins than to its capacity for global good, the Democratic Party had lost its way.

    Both parties concentrated on playing their assigned roles in the formulaic debate between "left" and "right" that characterized politics for most of the century—a debate that had become devoid of meaning, dependent on memory, derisive of the many. If American politics of the 1980s and early 1990s was a school dance, the Republicans would be locked in a chaste, but fervent embrace of economic elitism; the Democrats would be doing the lambada with cultural elitism; and America's middle class would be standing unobtrusively alone by the punch bowl. Politics was playing to those who favored French mustard—and ignoring those who used "French's." It rejected their interests and sneered at their values.

    As the 1992 campaign got under way, few in Washington seemed to recognize this problem. But, far away from the glare of the national media's spotlight, a Democratic contender who had developed a cohesive critique of not only the Republican record but his own party's as well was preparing to step forward.

    Arkansas' youthful, yet veteran, governor, Bill Clinton, was, as he described himself, "a different kind of Democrat." In a political career built like most—on lucky breaks, one of Clinton's luckiest came early on. In 1974, he lost his first race—a run for Congress. Beginning his career on the state level instead, he gained a greater perspective on the changes transforming America. Of course, he paid a price for this distance from D.C. His name wasn't bandied about with breezy familiarity at the chardonnay and brie parties on the Upper East Side where campaign cash is collected. He did not become a powerful, beef-ingesting, pork-dispensing, perk-exploiting Capitol Hill baron. Yet his breathing distance from Washington allowed him to realize very early on that the Capital's political debates were increasingly irrelevant to a changing nation. Announcing his presidential candidacy in October of 1991, he further distanced himself from the most powerful leaders of his own party. "The small towns and main streets of America aren't like the corridors and back rooms of Washington," he intoned from the steps of Arkansas' Old State House. "People out here don't care about the idle rhetoric of `left' and `right' and `liberal' and `conservative' and all the other words that have made our politics a substitute for action."

    Clinton demonstrated a clear willingness to challenge both the Democratic Party's political arrangements and its ideological orthodoxies. For more than a year, as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council—a band of party rebels committed to building a new governing majority—Clinton had traveled the country speaking out on the party's need to change in order to keep up with the times. Now, as his presidential campaign got under way, Clinton would break forthrightly with his party's past.

THE COMING OF THE NEW COVENANT

I believe that together we have fulfilled the responsibility of our generation to guarantee opportunity to the next generation, the responsibility of our generation to take America into a new century, where there is opportunity for all who are responsible enough to work for it, where we have a chance to come together across all of our differences as a great American community.

—President Bill Clinton, at the balanced budget signing,
August 5, 1997

On October 23, 1991, twenty days after he announced his candidacy, Clinton traveled to Georgetown University, his alma mater, to deliver the first in a series of three speeches that formed the intellectual foundation of his candidacy. By the time he finished delivering the third in mid-December, he was languishing in fourth place in the polls in New Hampshire and had managed to raise only half as much in campaign funds as the leading fund-raiser in the pack. However, the press realized the effectiveness of his message. For instance, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote that through this series of three speeches, "Clinton has cornered attention." Largely on the basis of these speeches, they anointed him with a front-runner status that he was to take all the way to the nomination.

    The speech Clinton delivered that October day was one of the most eloquent given by an American politician in the past quarter century. Devoid of rhetorical bells and whistles, its power came from its honesty, from Clinton's willingness to speak truths that many politicians knew but few then had the courage to say.

    Clinton thundered at those—rich, poor, and in between—whose demand for special favors had undermined the basic American creed of fairness. He said it was time that all Americans—from corporate CEOs to deadbeat dads, from Congressional chieftains to welfare moms—were held to an equal standard of responsibility for their actions. He offered a "New Covenant, a solemn agreement between the people and their government, to provide opportunity for everybody, inspire responsibility throughout our society, and restore a sense of community to this great nation."

    Like President Reagan's central themes of smaller government, lower taxes, and stronger defense, this triad—opportunity, responsibility, community—served as the guiding principles of Clinton's presidency. These ideas were at the core of most every speech he delivered as president, and certainly every major one. In 1991, they were not just idle slogans, but fundamental departures from the Democratic dogma of the previous twenty-five years. They underscored his "different kind of Democrat" claim—an assertion that was central to his ability to win the White House. It is no accident that Walter Mondale did not even use the word "responsibility" once in his convention acceptance address while Bill Clinton used it six times.

    In his first presidential campaignn, Clinton used "opportunity, responsibility, and community" to differentiate himself from both traditional Republican and Democratic nostrums. "Opportunity" was neither the no-growth economic record and indifference of the Bush years nor the government guarantee of equal results proffered by many Democrats—it was an outlook of rewarding hard work, encouraging strong economic growth, and above all else promoting access to education. His vision of "responsibility" included not just a promise to "end welfare as we know it," but an uncompromising demand for better corporate citizenship. Finally, his call for "community" rejected the loose principles of both the Left and Right, vowing to go "beyond every man for himself on one hand and the right to something for nothing on the other."

    Clinton's New Covenant was less the basis for a new politics than a powerful reminder to the public that Clinton shared their distaste for the "brain-dead" old politics. Yet, it clearly reflected the raw resentments and muffled hopes of the average men and women who had seen both parties walk away from their historic commitments and get sidetracked by side issues. Unfortunately, as was once said of President William Howard Taft, if Clinton "were Pope he would think it necessary to appoint a few Protestant Cardinals." Once ensconced in office, Clinton brought into power a cadre of advisors and staffers who never bought into his message of change. He and his party paid a disastrous price for this in the 1994 midterm rejection.

    In the summer of 1997, some of the White House staff gathered together in the ornately tiled Indian Treaty Room for a good-bye party for Donald Baer. The hard-driving former journalist who became Clinton's chief speechwriter and then communications director had helped engineer the president's political resurrection after 1994 and was one of the few true believers within the White House. As part of the "entertainment," the guests were treated to a parody of "We are the World," entitled "We are Dons World," written and performed by many of the White House speechwriters and communications staff. But it wasn't only the voices that were off-key.

When we were down and out
And there seemed no Hope at all
Don helped build that bridge
And now we're standing tall.

Well well well, we're a community now.
An opportunity to take responsibility
In our churches, mosques, and synagogues.

    Rising to deliver some brief words of thanks to Baer, President Clinton couldn't help but deliver a mild rebuke to his staff members. His smile never leaving his face, but his eyes betraying a profound disappointment, Clinton said, "The thing about that `opportunity, responsibility, and community' is that for Don, they were never punch lines. They were what he believed in." As is often true, Clinton was also describing himself. But if he was disappointed in his staff, he might have seen where he fell short in leading them.

THE SON ALSO RISES

In signing the balanced budget, Clinton tried to make clear, once and for all, that Democrats would no longer peddle the shopworn planks of a bygone era. Whether it was free trade, welfare reform, fiscal responsibility, battling teen pregnancy, strong anticrime measures, use of military force abroad, or the death penalty, Clinton broke with the philosophy his party had promoted in recent years.

    Yet, there is little assurance that his personal impact on the Democratic Party is necessarily anything more than ephemeral. From the very beginning, Clinton concentrated first and foremost on bringing change to the nation and saw bringing change to his party—if it happened—as a positive side-effect. Mere days after his election, the barons of congressional power flew down to Little Rock to meet with Clinton—an outsider who had explicitly campaigned against both the Democratic Congress and Washington, D.C., in general. Before the glare of the camera lights, these Washington pooh-bahs appeared with the crusading young reformer from the hinterlands and, in effect, took him under their left wing. "Don't worry, sonny," they seemed to say. "We'll show you how it's done." And Clinton followed their lead. His calls for cuts in bloated Capitol Hill staff and for the line-item veto vanished, he soft-pedaled his desire for campaign finance reform, and he suddenly became vague on the middle-class tax cut—once a centerpiece of his economic agenda.

    From there forward, until his decisive break with congressional wisdom over the need for a balanced budget in the summer of 1995, Clinton chose accommodation over confrontation most every time. As president, he was seldom willing to expend his political capital in reconstructing the Democratic Party in his image. Most of his words and many of his actions pointed Democrats in a new direction. But when the forces defending the old party's apparatus and guarding its arrangements got in the way, he smoothed down the differences. This worked wonders for making peace; it was an enormous missed opportunity for remaking the Democratic Party.

    Yet, while Clinton might have sped up the process, politics continued to change even without his active assistance. The same societal forces that had shaped Clinton in Arkansas were having an even greater impact in shaping the next generation of political leaders around the nation. As the 1990s progressed, it became increasingly apparent that the old ways of American politics were fading away. The story of one family in particular makes it clear that it is truly not your father's politics.

    One would expect a moment of personal conversion to come while watching the sun rise over Machu Picchu, while running one's hands over the stones of the Great Wall of China, while traveling down the road to Damascus. It seems far less likely—and much less glamorous—for this moment of awakening to occur while campaigning for a state senate seat in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. After all, Saint Paul is one thing, St. Paul is another. Nevertheless, for one Minnesota politician, his successful first campaign put him in touch with voters who had concerns and outlooks very different from those of a previous generation.

    The story begins 125 hundred miles away in a different world. On Halloween night 1936, the children of Theodore Mondale did not go door to door searching for candy. Their father was a stern and reverent preacher who frowned on the holiday's frivolity. Moreover, the tight grip of the Great Depressions seventh year left little levity in their tiny town of Ceylon, Minnesota. But there was another reason why the Mondale family was at home on this Halloween. Theodore Mondale had gathered his family to listen to the radio as Franklin Roosevelt brought his reelection campaign to a close with a stirring address at Madison Square Garden.

     In a fiery speech, FDR sought to energize the Democratic Party's base of working Americans with a violent denunciation of the big business interests that he had battled during much of his first term. "I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match," said Roosevelt, struggling to make his voice heard above the crescendoing cheers of the crowd. "I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master." Listening at his father's side, 8-year-old Walter Mondale was exposed to a brand of politics he would practice all his life.

    That October night, as he called "the roll of honor of those that stood with us," Roosevelt saw an industrial democracy with powerful interests arrayed on either side of a wide chasm. In his New Deal, he built up a big government to guarantee equal opportunity and protect Americans from the vicissitudes of adversity.

    A decade later, Walter Mondale became swept up in a small insurgent faction led by Hubert Humphrey that was fighting to bring the values of the New Deal to Minnesota. They were the children of FDR, the "distinct political generation" that Schlesinger had described. Attacked as an "upstart," Mondale laid into an old giant of Minnesota politics for being "a voice out of the past. A last gasp of the old farmer-labor group." He stated that his goal was to speak for a new "generation that has grown up to plague the normal and traditional way of doing things." In a world that changes much faster than the minds of the people who live in it, the challenge of politics in every age is to assess the world as it is and respond to it with honesty instead of nostalgia. When he was young, Walter Mondale met that challenge directly.

    But by the 1970s, as Mondale reached the heights of national leadership, America was changing both economically and socially. Americans were less likely to pledge their loyalty to parties in exchange for particular programs, to companies in exchange for a lifetime job, to interest groups in exchange for favors.

    While he was vice president, Walter Mondale stated that the Democratic Party's job was to "take care of its friends." That meant extending the reach of government to help those who had long been left out of the American Dream—the poor, minorities, struggling workers. Unfortunately, it also meant the care and feeding of the constituency groups that made up the party's special interest infrastructure by offering them specific promises and programs. Mondale believed that in addressing organized labor, he spoke to working people; in speaking to civil rights leaders, he addressed minorities; in talking with feminists, he appealed to women. "My premise has always been that there are more Democrats than Republicans, and if we can keep our own family relatively intact, chances are we'll win," he wrote in a memo to President Carter as they began their general election fight in 1980. He urged Carter to appeal "directly to our constituencies—Jews, labor, minorities, farmers, ethnics, women, environmentalists, etc." Running that fall against Ronald Reagan, Carter and Mondale did just that—and lost in a landslide.

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