By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate.

I am wary of media criticism from the left. Often, it is overdrawn, depicting the media as so much in the pocket of their corporate owners that no disturbing information or dissenting views can get a hearing. Such broad-stroke indictments--commonly heard on community radio stations and at almost any informal gathering of two or more leftists--won't really explain how the media confine the pubic discourse day in and day out. What's more, the sweeping indictments are easily dismissed, since occasionally a disruptive piece of information or a dissenting voice does make its way into the mainstream media.

This crude media criticism is not only distorting but debilitating, since it suggests the impossibility of presenting our own views to our fellow citizens in any great number. That's a recipe for resignation.

Comes now a valuable and sophisticated alternative critique, By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate (Common Courage Press). The authors, David Croteau and William Hoynes, may be familiar to some of you already, since they conducted the path-breaking studies of Nightline, MacNeil/Lehrer, and Public Television, which Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published over the last few years. Three of the six chapters of this book are basically reprints of the original studies, which concluded that "the public-affairs programs widely acknowledged to be the best and most prestigious in the United States generally present the world and worldview of those who wield power, defining a narrow consensus about the limits of acceptable political debate."

But since these case studies are old news by now, they are not what I find most useful about this book. What I do find useful and provocative is the theoretical scaffolding the authors erect around their studies.

In the first chapter, "Making Sense of Media Politics," they demolish the notion that we have a well-functioning free press. They document how the media no longer serve as effective watchdogs, and instead tend to act as "a transmission belt for official positions." Instead of watchdogs, the media have become lapdogs, they say. Nor, the authors argue, do the media serve the other two vital functions that they are entrusted with: providing a broad range of information, and presenting a forum for diverse opinions. The authors sketch the reasons for these failings, citing the corrupting influences of government sources, corporate ownership, and advertising pressures.

This is pretty much the standard leftwing critique, though with two virtues: it is presented here in clear and simple language, and for the most part it does not overstate the case. Here is one lapse, however: "The vast economic scale of media enterprises has resulted, in effect, in the denial of access to all those who do not meet with the tacit approval of the corporate sector." I added the italics to demonstrate the foolish use of the categorical; you only need to point to one appearance by Christopher Hitchens or Alexander Cockburn or Barbara Ehrenreich or Bill Moyers to disprove the claim.

The authors know better. In the last chapter, "Response and Action," they modify their statements. Instead of saying no access is granted to voices of dissent, they say no "regular" access. And they argue, quite rightly, that we cannot afford to abandon efforts to permeate the mainstream media.

For all the corporate domination of the media, it is still possible to get our ideas across if we package them in a form that the media can handle. This doesn't mean diluting our politics one drop; it just means presenting them strategically.

Over the last two years here, we've run something called the Progressive Media Project, which solicits opinion pieces from a broad cross-section of the national leftwing community. We then edit these pieces down into the clearest and most jargon-free English we can command, and then we distribute them to newspapers around the country.

We haven't ushered in the Paris Commune yet, but we have managed to place these left-wing views before millions of Americans who may never even have considered them before.

Croteau and Hoynes make one additional argument aimed squarely at progressives ourselves. They urge us to abandon the term "bias" when we describe the failings of the mainstream media. "We find the baggage of the term `bias' politically problematic," they write.

First, they say, since the right wing blabs about a liberal bias, it does us no good to talk about a conservative bias because then the mainstream media will feel comfortably situated in the middle and will use both charges as justification for their so-called objectivity.

Second, they argue that the use of the term "bias" itself presumes some nonexistent objectivity.

"Even the most astute progressive critics who rely on the language of bias at times cannot help but slip back into the language of objectivity, for it is to these questions that the language of bias ultimately leads," they write.

Instead, progressives should adopt "the language of diversity," they contend. Rather than call the media "biased," we should simply say that it lacks "diversity."

While I'm intrigued by their argument, I don't really buy it. I believe "bias" is the most descriptive common term for the distortions of the media, and it is possible to talk about a bias without bowing to the altar of objectivity. All we have to say is we have a bias, and we're open about it, but the mainstream media have a bias and they hide it.

So what if the conservatives use the same term? We need to wrestle it from them, and make our case.

Finally, the focus on "diversity" alone does not get at the ideological nature of much of the bias in the mainstream; it suggests that if the media simply granted access to a demographically representative group, that the ideological tilt would right itself, when in fact the media are quite adept at finding members from across demographic groups to mouth ingratiating platitudes.

I admire this book, though, for raising this issue and for providing a clear, coherent, and nuanced picture of the way the mass media muffle democratic debate. This is one of the better books of left-wing media criticism to come out in quite some time.

Joy Harjo is one of my favorite poets. A member of the Muscogee Tribe, she writes not only of the Native American experience but of the whole human condition in this late hour. Her latest work, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (Norton), is suffused with her rich and magical verse, long and complicated stories, as well as terse epigrams, and through them all, she conveys an implacable love and hopefulness.

She opens with "Reconciliation: A Prayer," whose essence is this stanza:

Oh sun, moon, stars, our other relatives

peering at us from the inside

of god's house walk with us as we

climb into the next century

naked but for the stories we have of each

other. Keep us from giving

up in this land of nightmares which is also

the land of miracles.

Harjo is a believer in stories, and a believer in miracles. She finds redemption in words, dreams, songs, ancestors, butterflies, laughter, kindness, beauty, and love.

And she writes of resistance. In "A Postcolonial Tale," she says, "This is the first world, and the last," but she exalts the "power of rising up."

There is violence and death in some of these poems, but they do not win the day. In "Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century," she tells of a taxi driver who was murdered. The friend of the taxi driver visits the murderer in jail and forgives him. The murderer "cries all the cries he has stored for a thousand years." She writes: "There is always a choice, even after death."

In "The Myth of Blackbirds," she tells of visiting the cold power center of Washington, D.C., with a lover. The brutality of the city makes nature unobservable ("I could no longer bear the beauty of scarlet licked with yellow on the wings of blackbirds") until she sleeps with her lover:

And in the predawn when we had slept

for centuries in a drenching 

sweet rain you touched me and the

springs of clear water beneath

my skin were new knowledge. And I

loved you in this city of death.

The lushness of Joy Harjo's language and the expansiveness of her spirit are redemptions in and of themselves.