All conservative, all the time

It's time to bury the myth of the "liberal media," writes Eric Alterman in his new book. How can progressives find their voice?

By David Talbot

Feb 28, 2003 | From time to time Salon has thought about launching a cable TV show. It seems like a natural leap -- we have a stable of smart political and cultural commentators who know how to banter and entertain on camera. And God knows the chat channels could use a regular dose of strong, articulate progressive voices to balance the fire-breathers on the right and the cautious centrists often presented as the liberal alternatives. Plus, Salon doesn't just chatter, we break news stories that create buzz. But whenever we engage with the cable TV gatekeepers, we never get beyond Step 1.

When Walter Isaacson took over CNN two years ago, I thought we had a shot. I was an acquaintance of his and I knew he read Salon -- he even poached our media critic when he was running Time magazine. But when I contacted Isaacson about exploring the possibility of a Salon-produced show for his network, his reply was vague and noncommittal. Not long after, it was reported that the new CNN chief was making a run at Rush Limbaugh, in what turned out to be a futile attempt to outfox Fox.

Salon's efforts to stir up interest at MSNBC also proved fruitless. When I called MSNBC chief Erik Sorensen, his assistant said he would get back to me. That was in December. Earlier this week Sorensen announced he was firing the network's sole liberal host, Phil Donahue, who admittedly seemed lost in the new TV environment, but who enjoyed the highest ratings on the struggling network. Meanwhile, days before, Sorenson announced he was hiring Michael Savage, a right-wing talk-show host so viper-tongued, as Ben Fritz recently observed, he "makes Rush Limbaugh look reasonable."

Ironically, the only cable news operation interested in meeting with Salon was Fox, liberals' favorite media whipping boy. Fox's top news executives sat down with a team from Salon in their Manhattan offices late last year, a meeting enlivened midway by the entrance of Fox's chatty, roly-poly dark lord, Roger Ailes himself. Now here was a man so supremely confident in his domination of talk-TV that he could grant a meeting to the enemy and graciously consider the counterintuitive notion of giving Salon a slot in his lineup, cheek by jowl with O'Reilly and Hannity and Hume.

Sitting at the head of a large oval table in the Fox conference room, Ailes launched into a spirited monologue on politics and media, dismissing Sen. Trent Lott, then the embattled Senate majority leader, as toast (which confirmed to us his days were numbered) and chuckling over the war that Bill O'Reilly had declared on Jesse Jackson. Ailes was the king of cable and he was clearly reveling in his power. Alas, he couldn't squeeze us into the Fox News schedule, Ailes told us -- every show in his lineup was "kicking the competition's ass" and he was not about to mess with success by opening a hole for Salon. Though he didn't say it, there was also a clear implication that a regular dose of Salon might be too much for his audience, which Ailes described as age "55 to dead, like me" (he left out white and intolerant). Years earlier, when hunting for a liberal punching bag to pair with Sean Hannity, Ailes had tried out a tough Salon writer. He apparently punched back so effectively in his audition that Fox picked bespectacled milquetoast Alan Colmes instead. Fox likes its liberals soft and chewy, the better to eat them, my dear.

Salon's unfortunate experience with the moguls of cable TV came back to me as I was reading Eric Alterman's new book, "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News." Alterman's book, which effectively demolishes the curiously resilient myth of liberal domination of the media, makes it plain that Salon's story is not unique. It's a myth that still has wide appeal, as the success of former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg's book, "Bias," demonstrated. But Alterman, a media critic for the Nation and MSNBC.com, makes a persuasive case for why the Goldberg view of the media is quaintly out-of-date. If a sophisticated, corporate liberal ethos once prevailed in the leading newspapers and broadcasting companies of America, that has long since been replaced by a media world characterized by a frenzied, profit-driven opportunism and thunderous rabble-rousing on the right.

Alterman paints a bleak picture: Talk radio is dominated by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, the Web has fallen to Matt Drudge, and cable TV is ruled by Ailes and his wannabes at the rival channels. Smart, media-savvy conservatives like William Kristol and Pat Buchanan quietly acknowledge that there is no longer a liberal media monolith -- but that doesn't stop them from "working the refs," writes Alterman, and using the myth to pressure mainstream media to tilt further right. "Many conservatives who attack the media for its alleged liberalism do so because the constant drumbeat of groundless accusation has proven an effective weapon in weakening journalism's watchdog function ... As [New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes]: 'The next time the [Bush] 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.'"

While Alterman's portrayal of the conservative media onslaught is convincing, the marginalization of liberals can't be blamed entirely on big bad Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Alterman's book is weakest at understanding why progressives also have themselves to blame for losing the media wars. More on this later.

But it's clear that one key reason conservatives have been so effective at pushing corporate media to the right is that they have built their own robust journalistic infrastructure, observes Alterman: "It is not simply that when you add up the circulation/penetration of the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Post, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, National Review, American Spectator, Human Events, www.andrewsullivan.com, the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, the entire universe of talk raadio, and most of the punditocracy, you've got a fair share of the media. The ability of these deeply biased and frequently untrustworthy outlets to shape the universe of the so-called liberal media gives them a large degree of power and influence that exceeds their already considerable circulations."

Next Page: Fellowships for right-wing pundits, pennies for lefty scribes

• View blog reactions