The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite.

FEELING BULLET-PROOF

HEY, YOU with the lapel microphone and the $600 suit. You at the editing terminal. Listen up. Bill Rusher has urgent things to say.

What's this about a "coming battle"? Well you should ask. Rusher isn't here to cudgel the media because he relishes the hollow sound produced when Sam Donaldson's pate is struck. He is issuing a solemn and serious warning, which is that the media are dispensing a distorted, monochromatic world view, and that dissatisfied customers sometimes take matters in their own hands, and have a right to. The question isn't whether there ought to be a battle for the media; the question is how soon it will start, and how it will come out.

"It is important," writes Rusher, "to stress that there is nothing sacrosanct about the present state of our constitutional or statutory law on the subject of the media's rights, privileges, and immunities. The media exist in the same polity as the rest of us, and they are, at least potentially, just as subject to restraint when their power becomes overweening or is grossly abused. Today, in the opinion of many serious observers, it is both." And again: "In one way or another, the media are going to be called to account for grave abuses of power, and on the outcome of the controversy may well depend the future direction, and future leadership, of American society."

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make--well, I don't know about "mad," necessarily. What about just deaf, heedless, pigheaded. The media today feel and act bullet-proof. So did the Bourbons, once. Rusher has not picked up scythe and flambeau, urging his comrades to the barricades. He does not even endorse particular techniques for bringing the media to heel. But such techniques exist--that's what he thinks the media should know.

As do I. This I say not in spite of my lifelong passion for journalism but, rather, on account of it. The media need all the Dutch-uncle talk they can get right now--particularly from within --and this is what Rusher offers. His book is wise, sensible, judicious--and biting.

My brothers and sisters in the media, many of them, will airily dismiss the book's early chapters. In these Rusher demonstrates--to my satisfaction, if perhaps not to Sam Donaldson's--the prevalence of liberal bias in the major media. (He does not, I should add, propose that this liberal slant be replaced with a conservative one: that would just leave us with the obverse of today's problem.) The bias argument is not new. Rusher, nonetheless, brings us deftly up to date, citing, among other recent studies, one by the Media Research Center strongly suggesting an incestuous relationship between the major media and the Democratic Party.

The media, I have noticed again and again, are unimpressed by evidence purporting to show a leftward tilt in news coverage and presentation. As Rusher notes, media folk will sometimes admit to personal liberalism but not to the slanting of news coverage to gratify that liberalism. Statistics suggesting bias against conservative policies or personalities are seen as suggestive of the statistician's own biases. In other words, the only problem with the media is that people think there's a problem with the media.

Press critics often labor inside a theoretical constraint: Yes, they say, the press is biased, but isn't the First Amendment a wonderful thing? That's what you say because it's expected. Rusher breaks joyously free of the constraint. Yes, the First Amendment is wonderful; it just doesn't mean--and never could mean--what modern media barons and their apologists make of it.

Rusher puts us a case: a hypothetical American invasion of Nicaragua in 1989. When the body count starts rising, the media seek to turn the country against the operation. The President, appealing to historical precedent, responds by invoking military censorship. Salus populi suprema lex; the people's safety is the supreme law.

The Founders, Rusher argues, intended to protect the "relatively weak journalistic megaphones possessed by every significant political party or tendency." Things are different today. The media "are simply the product of a series of historical accidents--individual initiatives, economic successes and failures, private political schemes, dynastic ambitions, and pure luck." What makes the beneficiaries think they merit "special authority to participate magisterially in the government of the United States"?

Indeed, some future Supreme Court could limit the reach of media freedoms; the Fairness Doctrine, which once required of radio and television stations balanced treatment of opposing viewpoints, could be "revived, taken seriously, and rigorously enforced": media personnel could be prosecuted for publishing damaging news leaks; the right of reply could be conferred by statute on people unfairly criticized in the press or on television. Some of which--such as the statutory right of reply--chills the blood. Even if Rusher is predicting, not prescribing, one hopes such predictions never come true. Reform is badly needed; but if it is to leave a valuable institution able to resume doing its job, it must come from within, rather than be imposed from without.

First, however, must come the desire for reform. The media--which are supposed to be the eyes and ears of a democratic citizenry--have decided they want to be our brains and hearts as well. They don't look exceptionally ready for change--which could some day prove to their misfortune and, may I add, the Republic's.