All conservative, all the time

Alterman knows firsthand the way the right built a network of think tanks and publications to nurture young journalists, thanks to the fortunes of ardent conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife. He started his own journalism career in Washington in the early 1980s, and it was grim enough to send a lesser man to business school. "Between 1982 and 1984, I think I earned a grand total of about $500 working as a liberal journalist, for articles in The Nation, In These Times, the Washington Monthly, the Washington City Paper, and Arms Control Today. Meanwhile the bars and softball fields of the capital were filled with young right-wingers living on generous salaries and fellowships provided by the multi-million dollar institutions like the Washington Times, Heritage Foundation, and their various offshoots ... Many of the writers who worship at the shrine of the free market would be lost if any of them were ever forced to earn their living working for it."

This new generation of right-wing journalists is marked by a vitriolic, take-no-prisoners style, writes Alterman. Thus we have the phenomenon of Ann Coulter, the freak-show journalist whose rhetoric is so amped up that she once wrote that the real debate about Clinton should be "whether to impeach or assassinate." Coulter's violently anti-Arab post-9/11 outburst ("invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity") cost the bomb-thrower her column at the National Review, but her career is flourishing, boosted by her bestseller, "Slander," and frequent appearances on shows like "Today" and Bill Maher's new HBO program, where her Tourette-like fusillades are apparently regarded as bracing television. The boldly mendacious Coulter's success at conquering the liberal media, writes Alterman, "demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a journalistic culture that allows her near a microphone, much less a printing press."

Not every conservative pundit is as unhinged as Coulter, of course, but as a group, writes Alterman, they dominate the TV and radio airwaves. The progressive side is still adequately represented in print, with columnists like Krugman and Frank Rich at the New York Times and syndicated columnists like Molly Ivins, Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer, Richard Cohen and E.J. Dionne. But not one progressive pundit has a perch on TV or radio -- the electronic marketplace where most of the public is exposed to the clash of ideas. Meanwhile, this marketplace resounds more and more with the angry fulminations of right-wing and far-right voices. George Will, Bob Novak, William Bennett, Patrick Buchanan, William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, Oliver North, the entire reactionary editorial board of the Wall Street Journal (which was given its own show by CNBC), Lawrence Kudlow, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, the whole Fox News lineup (with the pathetic exception of poor sacrificial lamb Alan Colmes).

"It's hard to come up with a single journalist/pundit appearing on television who is even remotely as far to the left of the mainstream spectrum as most of these conservatives are to the right," comments Alterman. "These people, as [Washington Monthly editor Paul] Glastris noted, 'are ideological warriors who attempt with every utterance to advance their cause.' To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left, a network would need to convene a 'roundtable' featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro."

When a liberal does manage to squeeze through TV's conservative phalanx and grab a regular network slot, the right can be counted on to howl in rage and anguish. Conservatives threatened to boycott CNN's "Crossfire" when the show replaced the bland and ineffectual man on the left, Bill Press, with two genuine brawlers, James Carville and Paul Begala. And when ABC made George Stephanopoulos the anchor of its Sunday chat show, "This Week," Bob Novak (a conservative TV fixture, Alterman points out, "who has enjoyed at least three shows at a time for decades") insisted "with a straight face" that this "proved the liberals control the media."

Stephanopoulos, who jump-started his media career by betraying the Clinton White House where he had worked, continues to take great pains to prove he is not a liberal loyalist. His debut program, Alterman points out, featured George Will but not a single liberal. The program grappled with Bush's drive to war with Iraq, but not a "single guest or regular panelist spoke out" in objection to the president's plans, according to Alterman. The neutering of George Stephanopoulos, who many still remembered as the young combatant in the Clinton war room, was complete.

As Alterman makes clear, all the hot air blowing across the nation from the right is not just, well, hot air -- it has made a substantial impact on national events, from the Clinton impeachment to the 2000 election (and its Florida meltdown), to the marketing of the Bush administration and its Iraq war plans. After successfully seducing the media during his first presidential campaign, Clinton came to be despised by the Washington press corps. In part this was because of the Clintons' ill-considered decision to shut out the press once they moved into the White House, concedes Alterman. But this was not the crucial reason. After all, the Bush team has been much more authoritarian and stonewalling in its relations with the media.

In a widely discussed commentary, Washington Post White House reporter John Harris pointed to a much more important reason for Bush's easy ride in the press, compared to the bare-knuckled treatment Clinton got: "There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president. There was such a gang ready for Clinton in 1993. Conservative interest groups, commentators and congressional investigators waged a remorseless campaign they hoped would make life miserable for Clinton and vault themselves to power. They succeeded in many ways."

What Harris did not mention was that it's not just the conservative attack dogs in the media who were baying for Clinton's blood, it was Washington's press establishment, which has turned increasingly conservative and elite over the years. So much so, in fact, that the dean of the capital press, Post columnist David Broder, was moved to dismiss the duly elected president as a low-class usurper, sniffing to the equally disdainful Georgetown gatekeeper Sally Quinn that "Clinton came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place."

It was the conservative shock troops who kept adding fuel to the Clinton impeachment bonfire. But to its everlasting shame, it was the Washington and New York press establishment that made these flames the nation's top story, month after month -- a shame even greater, in retrospect, considering what a real conflagration the world was hurtling toward. A president's sex life was suddenly declared the public's most pressing business. These were the days when Tim Russert would respectfully bring Matt Drudge onto "Meet the Press" while flaying upstart Salon week in and week out (with no chance for response) for daring to ask questions about the endless, free-spending, and utterly unproductive Starr inquisition.

And in the process, an administration that in reality turned out to be relatively scandal-free was brought to the brink of destruction. ("During the single-term George H.W. Bush administration, seven officials were indicted, five were convicted, and five officials were pardoned before they could be sentenced or convicted," observes Alterman. "For the Clinton administration, the sum of officials indicted, including all of the 'gates,' is zero.") And the irony, of course, was that a number of Clinton's political accusers were also active or former adulterers -- as were "many of the top editors and executives of extremely powerful news organizations."

Next Page: Cokie Roberts on the Florida recount: "People just wanted the election to be over"

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