Working the refs.

What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News By Eric Alterman. Basic Books, 2003. 322 pages. $25.

I was speaking somewhere a couple of months ago--it might have been at the Madison Lions Club--when a member of the audience asked, "Some say the media is conservative; some say it is liberal. Which is it?"

I wish I had the man's name, because I'd send him a copy of Eric Alterman's new book, What Liberal Media?

While I have some problems, big and small, with his book, Alterman does make a strong case that the so-called liberal media (which he annoyingly abbreviates as SCLM) is not so liberal after all.

Some of the damning evidence he adduces is from conservatives themselves, who confess to playing up the liberal charge for partisan political advantage. Alterman quotes William Kristol of The Weekly Standard saying, "I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." Kristol should know. He's everywhere in the media, the soft-spoken voice and twinkly eye of the neoconservative movement. Alterman also cites Rich Bond, who was chair of the Republican Party during the 1992 election. Bond admitted that he tried to "work the refs," as he put it.

Alterman takes this as a point of departure. "The right is working the refs," he writes, "and it's working. Much of the public believes a useful, but unsupportable, myth about the SCLM, and the media itself have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop."

Setting out to clear the field, Alterman disposes of Ann Coulter, author of Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, and Bernard Goldberg, who wrote Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.

He then takes on the influential 1996' Freedom Forum poll of Washington bureau chiefs and Congressional correspondents, which found that 89 percent of them voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Alterman throws all sorts of arguments at this one: voting for Clinton doesn't mean you're a liberal like European social democrats or the American philosopher John Rawls; some voted for Clinton because he was a boomer like them or a policy wonk like them, or a "New Democrat" in favor of the death penalty and ending welfare. On top of all that, Alterman goes after the methodology of the sample itself.

But after all that slogging, he appears to throw in the towel. "Then again, let's not kid ourselves," he says. "The percentage of elite journalists who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 was probably consistent with the percentage he received among all well-educated urban elites, which was pretty high."

His main point here is that the personal biases of the reporters don't dictate the content they provide because the owners of their network or paper, by and large, are the ones calling the shots. The title of his chapter on the subject is the big giveaway: "You're Only as Liberal as the Man Who Owns You." Alterman cites the increasing oligopolization of the media, and he goes over much of the ground plowed by Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, Robert W. McChesney, and John Nichols (oddly, though, he mentions only Bagdikian). Says Alterman: "The reporter, the editor, the producer, and the executive producer all understand implicitly that their jobs depend in part on keeping their corporate parents happy."

Then he gets down to business. Alterman lays out in convincing detail how conservatives, not liberals, dominate the field of punditry in television, print, radio, the Internet, and the think tanks.

In his TV chapter, he looks at The McLaughlin Group, George Will, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, and Hannity & Colmes. "Few liberal pundit/journalists have been given the opportunity to develop their television talents," he says.

When he moves on to print, Alterman goes after David Broder of The Washington Post. Since Broder is often described as a liberal, Alterman takes special pains to show that he is "a man of the floating center."

From there, Alterman examines the rightward drift of The New Republic, which is a very easy course to chart. And he tags Howard Kurtz, the press' critic for The Washington Post and host of CNN's Reliable Sources, even though Alterman acknowledges relying on some of the facts that Kurtz has unearthed.

When he turns to radio and the Internet, Alterman discusses the power of Rush Limbaugh ("650 stations and anywhere from fifteen to twenty million listeners") and Matt Drudge ("who claims more than 100 million visits a month"). And he notes, as he did in his treatment of McLaughlin and O'Reilly, that repeated factual blunders by Limbaugh and Drudge do not seem to slow them down any, much less shame them.

Finally, Alterman surveys the political think tanks and publishing houses in the media aquarium. Here he demonstrates how strategic the right wing has been over the past three decades by funding "the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, and a host of smaller ideological shops to drown out the liberals and moderates with their own analyses."

And yet, I can't wholeheartedly recommend this book. First, there s a problem with tone. Alterman is infatuated with the word "punditocracy," and he's infatuated with the fact that his 1992 book "gave the punditocracy its name." As if he has the term trademarked and is receiving royalties, he uses "punditocracy" in four of his chapter headings.

Another off-note is when Alterman overemphasizes the appearance of conservative female pundits. Discussing Laura Ingraham, he writes: "She landed on her feet and soon made a career (quite ironically, given her good looks) on talk radio."

Worse, he gets out the hatchet for Alexander Cockburn, a fellow columnist for The Nation. He calls Cockburn "a longtime Stalinist communist" who tarnishes the magazine's reputation, and six pages later, in case you were sleeping, he chops away again, referring to Cockburn this time as "a discredited Stalinist who continues to be allowed, for reasons I do not understand, to stain the good name of The Nation with his presence."

In his preface, Alterman writes, "I think I am fair (and balanced) in my judgments to both friend and foe." Hardly.

Alterman is also dismissive of Robert Fisk of the London Independent, who to my mind is one of the best foreign correspondents working today. Alterman calls Fisk "perhaps the most anti-American correspondent employed by a major English-language newspaper." If you criticize U.S. policy, does that make you anti-American?

And he is unfair to Broder. Alterman claims Broder is most interested in making "the trains run on time." A centrist, perhaps. A fascist, no.

This book raises larger questions that Alterman does not satisfactorily address. I grant the fact of corporate ownership of the media, but what does that fact mean in practice? The case can be easily overstated, since good, solid reporting can be found on a not-infrequent basis in such places as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Night-line, and 60 Minutes. If ownership were everything, these pieces would be squelched.

And how permeable is the land of punditry? Alterman acknowledges that Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has been appearing frequently (and acquitting herself well, I might add) on the pundit shows. I've even seen Eric Alterman himself once or twice on CNN. I have no doubt that progressives are vastly outnumbered and outshouted, but it is not a closed universe.

That brings up important strategic questions: How worthwhile is it for progressives to try to play the media game, and if the game is so rigged, what are our alternatives?

Alterman mentions Jeffrey Scheuer's book The Sound Bite Society, which argues that the medium of TV favors simplicity, the very product that conservative pundits peddle. "For liberals, this is a problem with no easy solution," Alterman says.

I wish he would have wrestled with that problem a little longer and come up with some solutions.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.