The limits of media bias: try as they might, they couldn't put Kerry over the top.

EARLIER this year, Evan Thomas, Newsweek's Washington editor, conceded that there was media bias favoring Senator Kerry and speculated that it might be worth a 15-point Democratic advantage. He later amended this estimate, to a mere 5-point advantage. If that second estimate is correct, the Bush-Cheney ticket would, on a level media playing field, have defeated Kerry-Edwards by a margin of 8 points. Given the outbreak of despair among Democrats occasioned by an actual 3-point loss, Terry McAuliffe and the entire DNC would doubtless have committed mass hara-kiri following Kerry's gracious concession over a glass of hemlock.

It is almost certainly true that the Republican victory should have been larger. My own explanation for this shortfall, however, blames not the media, but President Bush--for failing to make 9/11 an occasion for reviving the traditional understanding of America as a melting pot, as opposed to various multicultural metaphors of salads and mosaics. Such a revival would have exactly matched the national mood of "United We Stand" and entrenched it for the long struggle against terrorism. And though the main purpose of such a cultural strategy would have been to strengthen America, it would also have aided the GOP as a side-effect. Whether they realize it or not--and some of the Bush people seem to see it as a handicap--Republicans are the party of assimilation. Short of enlisting in the armed forces, voting Republican is just about the most assimilated thing an immigrant can do. And stressing the melting-pot concept might have won over entire classes of voters hitherto less concerned about either patriotism or national security. Unlike FDR, however, President Bush made little attempt to turn a moment of patriotic unity into the permanent base for a large governing majority. Bush still won a majority of patriotic voters--including the "security moms"--but it could have been a larger vote and a larger victory.

FLAGRANT BIAS

Against such a wave of patriotism, the media would have labored in vain. Indeed, they labored in vain against a much smaller wave. But labor they did. Never before have the establishment media cast aside the diaphanous veils of objectivity with such reckless self-revelation. Many "Republican-leaning" newspapers even removed, like Salome, that seventh veil concealing their firm liberal bias in news reporting--namely, the editorial endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate. It was with a heavy heart, liberal editorialists wrote, that they abandoned a century of tradition to conclude that George W. Bush was just too far out of the mainstream of modern America to endorse. With such bastions of Republicanism as the Orlando Sentinel switching to Kerry, it is hardly surprising that the national media were almost part of his campaign.

No doubt the Media Research Center will produce a detailed study of the flagrant media bias. My purpose here is to look at some outstanding examples of it and to ask why it failed to deliver a Kerry win. The first case--establishment-media coverage of the Swift-boat vets--is like the Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that barked in the night. Holmes realizes that the guard dog did not bark ... because the intruder was its owner! Similarly, when the Swift vets alleged that Kerry was unfit for command--because of his war-crimes allegations against U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, and his exaggerations of his own bravery there--the media failed to bark for a very long period. Then, when the silence became uncomfortable, it licked Kerry's hand. The New York Times ran a story to the effect that the Swift vets were a front for the Bush-Rove campaign. Unfortunately, that compelled them to explain what this sinister front group was saying--so a number of media outlets tried to debunk the Swift-vet allegations. But the charges, overall, rang true--and stuck.

Why did the Big Media fail in this effort? In the first place, they no longer control the news agenda as completely as they did a decade ago. To be sure, the provincial press still follows the Times, the Post, Time, Newsweek, and the three networks as slavishly as ever--why do you think they're called provincial? But the Internet (which makes newspapers worldwide available), the bloggers, talk radio, and Fox News among them have a sufficiently large audience to force stories into the national consciousness even if they are shunned by what Paul Johnson calls the seven deadly sinners. It was owing to this alternative discussion of the Swift-vet allegations that Unfit for Command became a bestseller. Second, the bloggers--dismissed by one news executive as nerds sitting in front of their computers in pajamas--were more hard-nosed in their investigations and better informed in their analyses. The blogging community does not lack editors, it transpires; every blogger is an editor--and a fairly tough old-fashioned editor, at that: one intent on getting the facts right. News analyses in the major papers were repeatedly torn to shreds by the bloggers within hours. "Respected" columnists were laughed to scorn for their laziness in publishing pro-Kerry arguments that had been disproved online days before. It seemed the establishment media simply couldn't get it right--likely because, at some level, they believed the Swift vets and could not bear to look too closely into their claims. Whatever the cause, the coverage discredited the media more than it did the Swift vets.

DAN RATHER'S FLAMEOUT 

The same media that had shunned a sharp new story in that case were subsequently enthused by a battered old case of fraud: Dan Rather and CBS were taken in by some forged documents purporting to show that George W. Bush, as a young man, had used his father's political pull to evade Vietnam by getting into the National Guard, lollygagging around while there and failing to obey a direct order to get a physical exam. Within minutes of the broadcast the fraud was detected by a blogger, and within two days--at most--it was generally accepted that Rather had been led up the garden path. The key moment came when Terry McAuliffe speculated vaguely that if the documents were indeed fraudulent, then maybe Karl Rove was behind the whole scam. (Aha!)

Dan himself remained unwilling to concede. "The boy stood on the burning deck / Whence all but he had fled." (Not an original Ratherism, I'm afraid, but close.) And he produced a lady stenographer who had worked for the National Guard officer who in turn had not actually composed, written, or dictated the documents whose authenticity was in doubt (aha!) but who would have done so if he had been given the chance. She knew they represented his opinion of Bush, because she had typed similar documents about Bush for him. It was wonderfully reminiscent of the Jesuit debater's response to the argument that there was no evidence in the writing of the early Church fathers for his favorite doctrine: "Admittedly, there is no evidence in the writings of the fathers that have survived, but there is a mass of evidence in the documents that have perished." In the end, Dan was unable to get his hands on the documents that had perished and had to concede that the other documents in his possession could not be proved genuine.

As the flames rose higher, however, he stuck to what he thought was the gravamen: The documents may be false, but the story about Bush's lackadaisical National Guard record was true. It did not seem to occur to Rather and CBS that though every other news organization in the world might reasonably advance that claim, for them the story was the fraud: They had to acknowledge it without any self-justifying qualification. Above all, they could not use the excuse that the Daily Mirror editor used to justify running fake photographs of British soldiers torturing Iraqis--namely, that the false evidence illustrated a larger truth. That is a manifestly inadequate argument in itself: Lies do not help establish truth. And it was given no serious additional support by the interviews that Dan conducted with other Texans claiming to have helped Bush--they all had possible partisan motives for discrediting the president and they were contradicted by other witnesses from that time. And what was the larger truth anyway?

The larger truth was that Bush was an idle, drunken, irresponsible wastrel as a young man. Well, so what? He tells us that all the time. As Mark Steyn pointed out, Rather and CBS were simply reiterating the life-affirming biography of the 43rd president: wasted youth, love of a good woman, demon drink forsworn, born again, serious husband and father, from the White House to the White House. Rather's scoop was no better than if he had produced a membership list of the East Houston Alcoholics Anonymous and pointed triumphantly to a scrawled signature that might be either "George W. Bush" or "Sonia N. Hunt." Unlike the Swift-vet allegations, which attacked a key Kerry argument, the Rather strike hit Bush like a congratulatory slap on the back: "You've come a long way, baby." What is revealing, however, is that Rather and CBS thought that it would damage the president--and for that reason were unwilling to admit defeat long after the corpse was buried.

Journalists outside CBS may have sympathized, but they knew a lost cause when they saw it. They shuffled quickly away, muttering platitudes about journalistic ethics and proper sourcing. But CBS found an influential ally in a third case--namely, the last-minute surprise that wasn't, or the case of the missing munitions. Again, a simple storyline: An official of the IAEA asks Iraq for information on munitions that had once been stored there; he is told that they can't be found--they have disappeared while under U.S. control; this reply is leaked to CBS and the New York Times; and CBS wishes to unveil the scoop two days before the election. About of journalistic ethics breaks out at the Times--which wants to run the story sooner so that 1) they will not both be scooped by other news outlets and 2) the administration will have a decent time to respond. The Times got its way.

The story probably damaged the Bush campaign somewhat, but the extra week allowed the following things to happen: All sorts of facts emerged to refute or at least to cloud the original story--they were removed before the U.S. arrived, they were removed by the U.S. after we arrived, they're still there, and so on, until everyone is thoroughly confused.

Finally, deprived of its #1 October Surprise, CBS's 60 Minutes ran a story about how National Guard units in Iraq lack vital equipment such as armored vehicles and bullets. This was a serious and important story. If it was intended to damage Bush, however, it was wide of the mark, because its focus was mainly on congressional misallocation of defense spending for "pork," and because Kerry voted against the $87 billion allocation for Iraq. So the media campaign ended not with a surprise but with a badly aimed bang.

The short moral of all these episodes: For the media: Throw fewer boomerangs. For the Democrats: Friends don't let friends drive wearing blinkers. And for the Republicans who deal with the media: Buy a dog.