All conservative, all the time

Every now and then, Democratic Party contributors or Hollywood celebrities make noises about producing a liberal show for radio syndication or even raising money to build a liberal cable network to compete with Fox. But nothing ever comes of it. Wealthy progressives can be counted on to help finance Democratic candidates and worthy environmental and civil-liberties causes. But despite the fact that many have experience in the entertainment and media industries, they seem clueless about to how engage their political opponents in the media ring. They have proven unwilling to kick in the kind of money that a Richard Scaife or Rupert Murdoch has in order to start a rival media empire, or even to substantially fund the existing progressive media companies, allowing them to expand their influence. Liberal donors realize that Election Day is important, but unlike their conservative counterparts, they fail to appreciate that Election Day is won or lost months or years before by winning the hearts and minds of the American people. And that's done largely through the media.

Alterman understands that liberals need to shed their elite image if they want to win the media wars, telling Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" this week they must find "their own populist voice." But he never suggests how this might be accomplished. And the swipes he has taken at Salon and other publications for their "tabloid" inclinations -- running sex and celebrity coverage side by side with more serious political and cultural journalism -- betray his own elitist bias. As the Nation and American Prospect have demonstrated -- or the National Review and Weekly Standard on the right -- there is no way to build a mass audience for an editorial product filled only with political reporting and analysis. Pundits, activists and policy wonks might find this a nutritious diet, but most readers want some sugar and spice as well.

Rupert Murdoch gets this big-time, and so does Roger Ailes. And that's why they're beating the hell out of the prissy corporate wafflers at the other networks. They mix their fire-breathing ideology with heaping doses of crime coverage, sensationalism and -- in the case of Murdoch's entertainment channel -- lots of cheap titillation. Alterman turns up his nose at all this. But there was a time when American media moguls -- not just Australian -- knew how to reach a mass audience of working stiffs and immigrants. And, like the young Hearst, they did it not only with progressive journalistic crusades, but with lurid coverage of the sex and violence-filled urban streets, gaudy comics, frothing columnists and the like. Liberal journalists need to spend less time mulling over the big ethical questions at the Kennedy School and the Aspen Institute, and more time thinking about how to engage and energize their audience.

There is one other question raised by Alterman's book. Yes, American journalism is being pushed in an angry, partisan direction by conservatives. But is the answer for liberals to push back with equally partisan fervor? This is a question that we grapple with nearly every day here at Salon. We still try to follow our original goal of emphasizing reporting over editorializing and of opening up Salon to a variety of voices, "like a good dinner party," as our mantra goes. But as the conservative din smothers alternative voices in the media at large, and as Washington becomes a one-party town, Salon has become more consistently progressive over the years, as if to balance everything around us in the media world. But for some ardent progressives, Salon is not politically pure enough. Alterman takes us to task (as well as Slate) for publishing conservatives like Andrew Sullivan -- as do many of our readers. Imagine conservatives boycotting Fox because they let Alan Colmes spar with Sean Hannity? But party-line journalism, of the left or right, that won't allow for dissenting voices makes for a grim and dull world. And we want no part of that, no matter how "them vs. us" that American society becomes.

Neal Gabler has written that the real media battle is not between conservatives and liberals, but between "those who believe in advocacy and those who believe in objectivity -- or at the very least, in the appearance of objectivity. And what we are witnessing is not just a political skirmish, but a battle for the soul of American journalism." According to Gabler, conservatives are dragging journalism back to an earlier, more primitive stage "when the press wasn't a light but a bludgeon. And the losers aren't just liberals. The real loser is the idea that the chief obligation of the press is to tell it the way it is without fear or favor." He makes a sobering point.

But while we're waiting for a more enlightened journalism to emerge, Eric Alterman is to be thanked for fully engaging the conservative media horde that has overrun the citadels of American communications. Because until liberals reassert their voice in the national dialogue, there can be no civil exchange of views.

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