Reality check

A $2.8 million campaign to expose the liberal media

From the time of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, conservatives have been making the faithful swoon by conjuring visions of the hellfire and damnation that await the liberal media elite. Now, like an evangelical church newly armed with a cable show and an 800 number, the ultraconservative Media Research Center is getting ready to take that message to a larger audience. The aim, according to the MRC's Tim Graham: to "expose the media" and "make bias an issue" in the 1996 presidential campaign.

The Alexandria, Virginia-based MRC earlier this month announced a $2.8 million effort, "Media Reality Check '96," with the goal of calling public attention to the press's alleged support for Bill Clinton's re-election. In effect, this amounts to unregulated campaign spending for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who recently complained that "the press does not lean our way."

The MRC, headed by New Right figure Brent Bozell, has been inveighing against liberal journalists for years with books such as How To Identify, Expose & Correct Liberal Media Bias and newsletters such as Notable Quotables and MediaWatch. The organization has built a reputation for factual credibility and a sense of humor, in contrast to Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, a far-right group that takes out shrill ads in the New York Times calling for an investigation into Vince Foster's "murder."

"Media Reality Check '96" will consist of e-mail "cyberalerts" to opinion leaders, an advertising and publicity campaign (including bumper stickers and other paraphernalia emblazoned with I DON'T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA), interviews on conservative radio shows, and, by the end of June, a World-Wide Web site (http://www.mediaresearch.org).

The opening salvo is a 271-page book by Graham titled Pattern of Deception: The Media's Role in the Clinton Presidency that serves as the right's case against the press. It's a comprehensive brief that displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of the conservative media critique.

On the one hand, the book is filled with eye-opening examples of obsequious treatment of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton by ABC's Peter Jennings, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, Time's Margaret Carlson, and numerous others.

On the other hand, Graham's contention that the media have given the Clintons a free ride on issues such as Gennifer Flowers, Paula Corbin Jones, draft-dodging, Whitewater, and Travelgate is unconvincing -- some of those stories nearly derailed Clinton's campaign in 1992, and one or more of them may yet bring him down in '96.

Much of Graham's argument consists of cant without context. He lambastes the media for describing the 1992 Democratic National Convention as unified and moderate, and the Republican convention as extremist and fractious. Yet the hateful tone of the Republican gathering, epitomized by Pat Buchanan's speech attacking gays, feminists, and minorities, was hardly a figment of the media's imagination. Graham complains that the press has pronounced Anita Hill more believable than Paula Corbin Jones, even though a number of pundits, including Rush Limbaugh and Fred Barnes, embraced Jones and trashed Hill. Graham even trots out that tired lament about the media's describing the Republican proposal to slow the growth in Medicare spending as a "cut" -- an accurate description, according to independent analysts, since it would require service reductions.

Nest of libs

There's a reason that charges of liberal bias have resonance: working journalists are, broadly speaking, liberal. A recent survey of the Washington press by the Gannett-sponsored Freedom Forum and the Roper Center showed that 89 percent of reporters voted for Clinton in 1992, and that 61 percent described themselves as "liberal" or "moderate to liberal" ("Don't Quote Me," News, May 17). The results were similar to those of other surveys taken over the past several decades. And yes, the Washington press corps did have an affinity for Clinton, at least in 1992. As Graham notes, Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Republic during the early stages of the campaign that most of his colleagues considered Bill Clinton "the most talented presidential candidate they have ever encountered."

That is just a small part of the picture, though. What the MRC doesn't get -- or chooses not to get -- is that many of those liberal reporters bend over backwards to avoid being accused of bias, bashing Clinton unmercifully for petty and even non-existent scandals. Remember Haircutgate? Indeed, even Terry Eastland, a former Reagan Justice Department official who's now editor of the conservative Forbes MediaCritic, thinks the media put Clinton through an exceptionally brutal "honeymoon" period over such issues as gays in the military and Zoë Baird's household-help troubles. No less a conservative than Newt Gingrich has said that "the press overall has been very tough on the president and Mrs. Clinton."

If conservatives have a legitimate point to make on the toughness front, it's on the kinds of issues the media choose to be tough on. A Gingrich spokesman told the Phoenix, for instance, that the Speaker was referring to the media's focus on Clinton's personal problems, and that Gingrich actually believes the press has been too easy on the president in its policy coverage. Eastland amplifies that point, offering the example of a speech on affirmative action in which Clinton took credit for repealing an unpopular program that had enriched a small number of well-connected black owners of radio and TV stations. The president had fought the repeal every step of the way, Eastland says, yet the media, so quick to pounce on minor Clinton scandals, ignored this blatant rhetorical contradiction. "There is stuff like this all the time," Eastland says. "Maybe the press corps is jaded."

Jaded, that is, except when it comes to "gotcha" journalism, whether it be about Bill's mistresses, Hillary's fingerprints, or other less-than-weighty affairs of state.

"The real ideology that matters is that of skepticism, hostility, and cynicism in covering politicians," says the Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows, author of the influential book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. "If party loyalty or party ideology had been the main factor, Clinton would have gotten a free ride in the press. I submit that he's gotten something far from that. The generally snarling tone about his motives, his slipperiness, and so on suggests that when two ideologies collide -- party ideology versus free-form nihilist ideology -- it's the latter that wins."

And though the press is liberal on most of the hot-button cultural issues such as gay rights and abortion rights, that liberalism largely masks the media's innate conservatism on economic and social issues. Who among the mainstream media, after all, has spoken out against Clinton's conservative support for free trade, for balancing the budget, and for cutting spending aimed at alleviating pove>

Reality check

A $2.8 million campaign to expose the liberal media

Nest of libs

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