The myth of a liberal media.

It is a widely accepted belief in this country that the media suffer from a liberal bias. Television pundits, radio talk-show hosts, and political leaders--including presidents of both parties--help propagate this belief, and their views are widely disseminated in the media. On the other hand, dissident critics--those who maintain that the corporate-owned press exercises a conservative grip on news and commentary--are afforded almost no exposure in this same supposedly liberal media.

Consider the case of David Horowitz. When Horowitz was a radical author and editor of Ramparts, the mainstream press ignored his existence. But after he and former Ramparts colleague Peter Colliers surfaced as new-born conservatives, the Washington Post Magazine gave prominent play to their "Lefties for Reagan" pronunciamento. Horowitz and Colliers soon linked up with the National forum Foundation, which dipped into deep conservative pockets and came up with hundreds of thousands of dollars to enable the two ex-radicals to do ideological battle with the left. Today Horowitz is a rightist media critic with his own radio show, who appears with dismaying frequency on radio and television to whine about how radio and television shut out conservative viewpoints.

Then there are the many talk-show hosts, of whom Rush Limbaugh is only the best known, who rail against the "pinko press" on hundreds of local television stations and thousands of radio stations owned by wealthy conservatives or under-written by big business firms. To complain about how the media are dominated by liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.

Then there are the well-financed right-wing media-watch organizations like Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media (AIM). In a syndicated column appearing in over 100 newspapers and on a radio show aired on some 200 stations, Irvine and his associates complain that conservative viewpoints are frozen out of the media. Many left critics would like to be frozen out the way AIM, Limbaugh, and Horowitz are.

Not to be overlooked is National Empowerment Television (NET), a new cable network available in all 50 states, offering round-the-clock conservative political commentary. In the words of its founder Paul Weyrich, NET is dedicated to countering media news that "is riddled with a far-left political bias" and "unacceptable" notions about "gender-norming, racial quotas, global warming, and gays in the military."

Political leaders do their share to reinforce the image of a liberal press. During the Iran-contra affair, President Reagan likened the "liberal" media to a pack of sharks. More recently President Clinton complained that he has "not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press." Clinton is confused; almost all the criticism hurled his way by the so-called liberal press is coming from conservatives.

He Who Pays the Piper

There is no free and independent press in the United States. The notion of a "free market of ideas" is just as mythical as the notion of a free market of goods. Both conjure up an image of a bazaar in which many small producers sell their wares on a more or less equal footing. In fact--be it commodities or commentary--to reach a mass market you need huge sums of money for production, exposure, and distribution. Those who are without big bucks end up with a decidedly smaller clientele, assuming they survive at all.

Who owns the big media? The press lords who come to mind are William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, Rupert Murdock, Arthur Sulzberger, Walter Annenberg, and the like--personages of markedly conservative hue who regularly leave their ideological imprint on both news and editorial content.

The boards of directors of printo and broadcast news organizations are populated by representatives from Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Dow Corning, Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, ITT, IBM, AT&T, and other corporations in a system of interlocking directorates that resemble the boards of other corporations. Among the major stockholders of the three largest broadcast networks are Chase Manhattan, J. P. Morgan, and Citibank. NBC is owned outright by GE. The prime stockholder of this country's most far-reaching wire service, Associated Press, is Merrill Lynch.

Not surprisingly, this pattern of ownership affects how news and commentary are manufactured. Virtually all the chief executives of mainstream news organizations are drawn from a narrow, high-income segment of the population and tilt decidedly to the right in their political preferences. Rupert Murdoch was once asked in an interview: "Your're considered to be politically conservative. To what extent do you influence the editorial posture of your newspapers?" He responded with refreshing candor: "Considerably ... my editors have input, but I make the final decisions."

Corporate advertisers exercise an additional conservative influence on the media. They cancel accounts not only when stories reflect poorly on their product but, as is more often the case, when they perceive liberal tendencies creeping into news reports and commentary.

As might be expected, the concerns of labor are regularly downplayed. Jonathan Tasini, head of the National Writers Union, studied all reports dealing with workers' issues carried by ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news during 1989, including child care and minimum wage: it came to only 2.3 percent of total coverage. No wonder one survey found that only 6 percent of business leaders thought the media treatment accorded them was "poor," while 66 percent said it was "good" or "excellent."

Religious media manifest the same gross imbalance of right over left. The fundamentalist media--featuring homophobic, sexist, reactionary televangelists like Pat Robertson--comprise a $2-billion-a-year industry, controlling about 10 percent of all radio outlets and 14 percent of the nation's television stations. In contrast, tens of thousands of liberal and often radically oriented Christians and their organizations lack the financial backing needed to gain media access.

The Petroleum Broadcasting System

A favorite conservative hallucination is that the Public Broadcasting System is a leftist stronghold. In fact, more than 70 percent of PBS's prime-time shows are funded wholly or in major part by four giant oil companies, earning it the sobriquet of "Petroleum Broadcasting System." PBS's public-affairs programs are underwritten by General Electric, General Motors, Metropolitan Life, Pepsico, Mobil, Paine Webber, and the like. One media watchdog group found that corporate representatives constitute 44 percent of the sources about the economy; activists account for only 3 percent, while labor representatives are virtually shut out. Guests on NPR and PBS generally are as ideologically conservative as any found on commercial networks. Even "Front-line" and Bill Moyers' "Listening to America"--favorite GOP targets--use Republicans far more frequently than Democrats.

Conservatives like Horowitz make much of the occasional muckraking documentary that is aired on public television. But most PBS documentaries are politically nondescript or centrist. Progressive works rarely see the light of day. Documentaries like Faces of War (revealing the brutality of the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency in El Salvador), Building Bombs (on nuclear proliferation), Coverup (on the Iran-contra conspiracy), Deadly Deception (an Academy Award-winning critique of General Electric and the nuclear arms industry), and The Panama Deception (an Academy Award-winning expose of the United States' invasion of Panama) were, with a few local exceptions, denied broadcast rights on both commercial and public television.

A rightist perspective dominates commentary shows like NBC's "McLaughlin Group," PBS's "One on One" (with John McLaughlin as host), CNBC's "McLaughlin Show" (with guess who), PBS's "Firing Line" (with William F. Buckley, Jr.), CNN's "Evans and Novak" and "Capital Gang," and ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley." The spectrum of opinion on such programs, as on the pages of most newspapers, ranges from far right to moderate center. In a display of false balancing, right-wing ideologues are pitted against moderates and centrists. Facing Pat Buchanan on CNN's "Crossfire," Michael Kinsley correctly summed it up: "Buchanan is much further to the right than I am to the left."

On foreign affairs, the press's role as a cheerleader of the national security state and free-market capitalism seems almost without restraint. Virtually no favorable exposure has ever been given to indigenous Third World revolutionary or reformist struggles or to protests at home and abroad against U.S. overseas interventions. The media's view of the world is much the same as the view from the State Department and the Pentagon. The horrendous devastation wreaked upon the presumed beneficiaries of U.S. power generally goes unmentioned and unexplained--as do the massive human-rights violations perpetrated by U.S.-supported forces in dozens of free-market client states.

Why Do Conservatives Complain?

If news and commentary are so preponderantly conservative, why do rightists blast the press for its supposed leftist bias? For one thing, attacks from the right help create a climate of opinion favorable to the right. Railing against the press's "liberalism" is a way of putting the press on the defensive, keeping it leaning rightward for its respectability, so that liberal opinion in this country is forever striving for credibility within a conservatively defined framework.

Ideological control is not formal and overt as with a state censor but informal and usually implicit. Hence it works with imperfect effect. Editors sometimes are unable to see the troublesome implications of particular stories. As far as right-wingers are concerned, too much gets in that should be excluded. Their goal is not partial control but perfect control, not an overbearing advantage (which they already have) but total dominance of the communication universe. Anything short of unanimous support for a rightist agenda is treated as evidence of liberal bias. Expecting the press corps to be a press chorus, the conservative ideologue, like any imperious maestro, reacts sharply to the occasionally discordant note.

The discordant notes can be real. The news media never challenge freemarket ideology, but they do occasionally report things that might put business and the national security state in a bad light: toxic-waste dumping by industrial firms, price-gouging by defense contractors, bodies piling up in Haiti, financial thievery on Wall Street, and the like. These exposures are more than rightists care to hear and are perceived by them as a liberal vendetta.

The conservative problem is that reality itself is radical. The Third World really is poor and oppressed; the United States usually does side with Third World oligarchs; our tax system really is regressive; millions of Americans do live in poverty; the corporations do plunder and pollute the environment; real wages for blue-collar workers definitely have declined; and the rich really are increasing their share of the pie. Despite their best efforts, there are limits to how much the media can finesse these kinds of realities.

The limits of reality sometimes impose limits on propaganda, as Dr. Goebbels discovered when trying to explain to the German public how invincible Nazi armies could win victory after victory while retreating on both fronts in 1944 and 1945. Although they see the world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and government elites, the media must occasionally report some of the unpleasantness of life--if only to mainatain credibility with a public that is not always willing to buy the official line. On such occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.

Rightist ideologues object not only to what the press says but to what it omits. They castigate the media for failing to tell the American people that federal bureaucrats, "cultural elites," gays, lesbians, feminists, and abortionists are destroying the nation, that the U.S. military and corporate America are our only salvation, that there is no health-care problem, that eco-terrorists stalk the land, that the environment is doing just fine--and other such loony tunes.

Self-censorship

Reporters often operate in a state of self-censorship and anticipatory response. They frequently wonder aloud how their boss is taking things. They recall instances when superiors have warned them not to antagonize big advertisers and other powerful interests. They can name journalists who were banished for turning in the wrong kind of copy. Still, most newspeople treat these incidents as aberrant departures from a basically professional news system and insist they owe their souls to no one. They claim they are free to say what they like, not realizing it is because their superiors like what they say. Since they seldom cross any forbidden lines, they are not reined in and they remain unaware that they are on an ideological leash.

While incarcerated in Mussolini's dungeons from 1928 to 1937, Antonio Gramsci wrote about politics and culture in his prison notebooks. But he had to be careful not to antagonize the fascist censor. Today most of our journalists and social commentators exercise a similar caution. However, unlike Gramsci, they are not in prison. They don't need a fascist censor breathing down their necks because they have a mainstream one implanted in their heads.

These internalized forms of self-censorship are far more effective in preserving the dominant ideology than any state censor could hope to be. Gramsci knew he was being censored. Many of our newspeople and pundits think they are as free as birds--and they are, as long as they fly around in the right circles.

For conservative critics, however, the right circles are neither right enough nor tight enough. Anything to the left of themselves, including moderate right and establishment centrist, is defined as "liberal." Their campaign against the media helps to shift the center of political gravity in their direction. By giving such generous publicity to conservative preachments and pronouncements while amputating everything on the left, the media limit public debate to a contest between right and center. In doing so, they are active accomplices in maintaining a rightward bent.

On the American political scene, the center is occupied by conservative Democrats like Bill Clinton, who are happy to be considered the only alternative to the ultra-right. This center is then passed off as "liberal." Meanwhile, real liberalism and everything progressive remain out of the picture--which is just what the mainstream pundits, publishers, politicians, and plutocrats want.