Context
Back to the Backlash
Thomas Frank
Readers in other countries will probably
be surprised to learn of the massive and virtually unchecked power that
leftists are reported to hold here in the United States. They will
scratch their heads and run down the list of American institutions—the
Presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the
corporations—and note that each of these is led either by determined
right-wingers or by weak-kneed centrists. They will remember how
recently it was that American thinkers proclaimed the dawn of a
capitalist millennium, a "New Economy" in which privatization,
deregulation, and lower taxes were said to be the mandates of history
itself; they will recall how greatly it pleased American CEOs to mount
the heights of Davos and instruct the entire world in the timeless
principles of the free market as handed down by Milton Friedman, Ronald
Reagan, and the prophets of Silicon Valley.
But in doing so they will have overlooked that little feature of American life which, it now seems, negates it all: TV news is slanted insidiously to the left! Dominated by a set of smug, clannish liberals, American conservatives
tell us, our TV networks twist the facts and distort our perception of
the world to match the liberals’ own. This is not to say that there is
a deliberate program of misinformation afoot in the broadcasting
companies. Instead, the sin is thought to be almost unconscious, a
matter of—to use the term that conservatives have favored for
thirty-three years now—“bias."
If you picked up Bernard Goldberg’s book Bias hoping to
find a meditation on the tricky problem of journalistic objectivity, or
a wide-ranging look at the sorry ruin that is the American press, or
maybe a few thoughts on just what "liberalism" means in this age of New
Democrats and casual, sensitive billionaires, you would be greatly
disappointed. Bias itself, the cultural crime that is the subject of
Goldberg’s j’accuse, is never really even defined. "Bias is
bias," Goldberg declares, simply. He knows it when he sees it, and he’s
here to tell you that it’s all over the damn place!
If you’re looking for a primer in the implacably indignant rhetorical
style of the culture-war right, however, you couldn’t ask for a more
exemplary work. The book begins by reminding the reader that in 1996
Goldberg wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed
criticizing his employer, CBS News, for broadcasting an opinionated
put-down of the "flat tax" (a short-lived conservative fad of the
mid-1990s) as though it were straight news. The appearance of this Wall
Street Journal article naturally infuriated Goldberg’s bosses and
colleagues at CBS, and he relates for page after page the personal
slights he endured as his former friends erupted angrily at him.
Goldberg relives every episode in surprising detail, and then tells us
why each colleague who disapproved of his op-ed was a hypocrite for
doing so. He lingers with especial bitterness on the figure of Dan
Rather, retailing all manner of damning facts about Rather’s personal
tastes (the cad wears Savile Row suits while affecting a Texas accent!)
and imagining him as a prison rapist and a mafia chieftain. Then he
branches out into other media, recounting the insults levelled at him
by people not associated with CBS News, and why they, too, were hypocrites. Then come the truculent imaginary come-backs that Goldberg would like to have delivered to those who dissed him. Soon it’s on to those who approved of Goldberg’s op-ed, with extensive quotation from their righteous
letters (photocopies of these are also provided in an appendix, in case
readers want to savor them again after they’ve finished the main text).
And then, after a brief digression, Goldberg returns to the subject
(we’re now on page 111) and tops it all off with a few paragraphs
bitterly assailing those completely unrelated figures who didn’t write anything about his op-ed at all!
I myself found all this tiresome, self-indulgent, and more than a
little embarrassing. But for others, I suspect, Goldberg’s obsessive
return to his own humiliation is powerfully compelling, one of the
things that has moved the book up the best-seller charts so briskly. No
matter how much power its corporate backers wield, no matter how far
back it rolls taxes or the welfare state, and regardless of how it
succeeds at the polling place, the conservative movement always manages
to understand itself as a beleaguered victim, forever on the outside of
a degraded modernity; forever on the defensive against a threatening
world of secular humanists, treasonous intellectuals, and tempting
entertainments. It pleases conservatives to think of themselves as the
true patriots, stoutly faithful to American tradition, and endlessly
persecuted for their steadfastness.
This surly sensibility of intolerably wronged righteousness finds its
signature literary expression in the dozens of passages in which
Goldberg settles unbelievably petty scores with this or that media
figure. Recounting how Tom Brokaw declined to discuss Goldberg’s op-ed
in a 1996 interview on a different subject because he thought it arose
from a feud with Dan Rather, Goldberg snaps, "Here’s a bulletin: In my
entire life I have mentioned Dan Rather’s name only once in a column. .
. ." Admitting that, okay, there was also a second column, Goldberg
continues: "I have written exactly two times about Dan Rather and
liberal bias—or, for that matter, about Dan Rather and any subject,
period!" A short while later, though, it is the hated Rather himself,
brushing off the complaints of "political activists" in an interview
with a New York tabloid, who triggers Goldberg’s massive retaliation: "Political activist? Time to take a taxi back to Earth, Dan." Goldberg just knows that
Rather’s remark was a reference to him, and he rages at the infamy of
the insult for nearly two full pages before being distracted by a
remark from a different CBS employee, who dismissed Goldberg’s op-ed as
a "wacky charge, and a weird way to go about it." "Wacky? Weird? Bizarre?"
Goldberg explodes. Bounces off me, sticks to you! "What I found wacky,
weird, and bizarre was that," this CBS employee approved of the hated
broadcast on the flat tax.
As the great Chris Lehmann has pointed out, short-fused touchiness is a
classic marker of the thirty-year-old bias genre, whose authors
consistently magnify even the most unremarkable media moments into
full-blown assaults on their political views. Bias, however, is presented as being something very different from the rest
of that cranky literature: After all, this is supposed to be the inside
dope. Not only does the book’s publisher advertise Goldberg’s former
position in the book’s press kit (“CBS News Veteran Exposes ‘Inherent
Bias’ in the Media") and in the book’s subtitle (“A CBS Insider Exposes
How the Media Distort the News"), but Goldberg is even moved to boast
about it in the book’s text, letting us know that, although many decry
liberal bias, "there’s a big difference when Rush Limbaugh or Bill
Buckley says it and when a CBS News correspondent says it."
But there really isn’t such a big difference. Goldberg’s moment of
glory—his critique of that long-ago broadcast on the flat tax—came not
from some dark insider revelation, but from watching an evening’s news
program on a TV set like everyone else. There are a few good CBS
anecdotes here and there in the book and plenty of ugly facts about Dan
Rather, but only a few of its larger criticisms are derived from
Goldberg’s privileged former position inside the beast. In fact, there
are very few larger criticisms at all. The book is a laundry list of
petty, unconnected objections to what Goldberg has seen on TV over the
years. He complains that TV news people readily identify conservatives
as "conservative" but rarely use the term "liberal" to describe
liberals. Goldberg criticizes the media for playing up homelessness
when Republicans were in office and then dropping it when Bill Clinton
came into power. Goldberg takes strong exception to stories that warned
of the spread of AIDS into the non-homosexual and non-drug-using
population. Goldberg spends an entire chapter getting indignant about
offensive talk-show remarks aimed at conservative figures and then
getting even more indignant about the wildly unfair (but completely
imaginary) punishments that, he speculates, might be handed down if one
said similar things about liberals. There is little effort to explain
any of these according to some larger account of what has happened to
the TV news industry, or to guess at the effects that such skewed
reporting has had; the only theory elaborated here is that "the Left
controls America’s newsrooms." Each of these arguments, it should be
noted, are old and familiar conservative plaints, several of them
having been elaborated at great length elsewhere. But let’s look on the
bright side—this certainly makes the book convenient: Here you have all
the cranky sniping of fifteen years in one volume, duly validated by an
"insider," and seasoned with heaping mounds of How Dare They.
It’s a shame that Goldberg never takes up the subject of press history.
Were he to do so, he would quickly run into the curious fact that,
until vice president Spiro Agnew inaugurated the liberal-bias critique
in 1969, the prevailing American criticism of the news media was the
diametric opposite of Goldberg’s own. The press, after all, was largely
owned by a subset of the very rich—Hearst, Gannett, McCormick—that was
peculiarly given to proclaiming its idiosyncratic but always
conservative views. The big-city dailies were bitterly hostile to
organized labor and to the New Deal. In 1936, for example, nearly 75%
of them endorsed Franklin Roosevelt’s opponent, with the Chicago Tribune actually counting down the days to the election with the words, "Only X
days remain in which to save your country." (To this day Republican
presidential candidates tend to win solid majorities in newspaper
endorsements.) The facts of media ownership underlay the media
muckraking of figures as different as Upton Sinclair (whose 1919 book The Brass Check compared journalists to prostitutes), George Seldes (author of the energetic 1938 exposé Lords of the Press), A. J. Liebling (the sedentary press columnist for The New Yorker),
and Edmund Wilson, who recounted in 1932 how he learned that "class
antagonisms, conflicts, and injustices are real, that they rarely get
any publicity, [and] that the class on top virtually controls the
organs of publicity."
Like Agnew and, indeed, like every author to go looking for liberal
media bias in the last thirty years, Goldberg simply stands this
formula on its head. Social class is still the center of the argument,
and the accusation is still that the news reflects the politics of the
class on top; it’s just that the class on top has changed. The "lords
of the press" have dropped out of the picture almost entirely:
Goldberg’s villains are the "liberal elite," that ill-defined but
damnably persistent worker of ideological mischief.
Ironically, Goldberg takes great pains to deplore the language of
"class warfare" when it’s used by the biased liberals of the media.
Within a few pages of doing so, however, Goldberg himself erupts in the
sort of class-baiting rotomontade that has propelled conservative
politics for the last thirty years: "The sophisticated media elites"
who run things "are hopelessly out of touch with everyday Americans,"
he writes. He recounts how a drawling, hard-working Southern friend saw
easily through their arrogance and clued him in to the flat tax
broadcast; the media elite don’t listen to such voices: "They don’t
have blue-collar people . . . in their families. They don’t have
blue-collar friends, and they don’t want any." Before long Goldberg has
worked this up into a vision of America torn geographically by class.
"It’s as if there were two Americas, or at least two American
cultures," he writes: "the media-elite America, which was shunning me,
and the other America—the one between Manhattan and Malibu." Getting a
little more specific, Goldberg identifies these humble, working-class
folk of the heartland as the inhabitants of "the ‘red states’ that
George W. Bush carried."
But there is a problem here, starting from Goldberg’s very first
example. The archetypal "blue-collar" Southerner whose trust and
friendship Goldberg is so proud of—the guy whom, he insists, the media
elite would rather "eat rat poison" than befriend—isn’t a member of the
working class at all. He’s a building contractor and thus an
entrepreneur and a boss, not a wage worker. Goldberg reports that this
heavily accented Man of the South objected to the CBS attack on the
flat tax because it was delivered by a "snippy wise guy," but he might
more plausibly have been pissed off because, like most people of his
rank, this building contractor stood to gain from the flat tax.
Goldberg thus thoroughly confuses class with culture: Not only does
overeducated "snippiness" take the place of economic interest, but the
contractor’s southernness, not his class status, is what ultimately
establishes that most critical of populist traits, his authenticity1.
This is why it means nothing in Goldberg’s scheme of populist righteousness that George W. Bush lost the popular vote of "everyday Americans" by a significant margin (and
only won by a hair in many of those heartland "red states"), or to
point out that his presidency has been distinguished by a remarkable
hostility to the interests of blue-collar people and a willingness to
grant corporate management any weapon it requests against organized
labor. Since free markets are for most conservatives the very essence
of democracy and of nature, those who accept markets unquestioningly
are—by definition—gifted with the common touch, while those who think
they know better are "elitists" defying the will of the people. For
them class is always a matter of culture—of fancy Eastern
colleges and big city ways and highfalutin social theories of all
kinds—and conservatives find it easy to understand themselves, as Peggy
Noonan once described Dubya, as the friend of "the nobodies," "the
modest, the patronized, the disrespected." Class is about pedantry, not
about economic power; it’s the divide between urban sophistication and
provincial piety, not the one between bosses and bossed. Upton Sinclair
and George Seldes damned the press lords for their hostility to labor;
Bernard Goldberg faults the media elite for not going to church.
Those who believe Americans have no sense of social class should take
note. Like nearly every popular conservative tract to appear in recent
years, Bias is written in the fulminating language of angry populism. Like The No Spin Zone, the collection of angry right-wing populist musings it displaced as a
number-one bestseller (and which was also marked by a special hostility
for Dan Rather)—and like the best-selling Rush Limbaugh books, like the
best-selling anti-Clinton books, like the best-selling stock market
advice books—Bias is at its best when it rails against the affected tastes and habits of the American upper class.
Which brings us to the infuriating irony behind all this strange
spectacle: The main reason conservatives have been able to annex the
language of social class so completely is the silence of their
opponents on that very subject. The Democratic leadership decided years
ago not to talk class anymore: These days they, too, rely on corporate
handouts to fund their campaigns; they, too, own stocks and live in
suburbs; and they believe that, as the monopoly party of "the left,"
they will receive the votes of workers and the poor without making
concessions to them, rhetorical or otherwise. This idiotic strategy has
been a godsend for the right, which has proceeded to capture and turn
each and every element of the old class-based critique of American life
(such as press bias) over the last thirty years. The results are truly
impressive. Not only do billionaire libertarians routinely pass
themselves off as bearers of the vox populi, but class anger in America
these days is channeled almost exclusively at that snooty species known
as the "liberal"; that there are upper-class people who drive Boxsters
and eat fancy French food while living in Houston and voting Republican
is simply not thought to be part of the possible. This curious cultural
fact in turn provides Republicans with a perverse incentive for pushing
the country still further down the free market road to social disaster:
The worse things get for workers, they have reason to believe, the
angrier we will become at those elitist liberals, and the more
Republicans will be returned to office.
So why doesn’t the mainstream media just roll out the older, less
contorted version of populism and blast this confused collection of
gripes back into the nineteenth century? Because the mainstream media
is, in truth, what Edmund Wilson and A. J. Liebling and Upton Sinclair
said it was, all those years ago. Yes, Mr. Goldberg, the media is
largely staffed by college-educated members of the upper-middle class.
And, yes, (big admission here) these reporters and newsreaders do tend
to share certain annoying ideas of politeness and cultural propriety,
which some understand as "liberalism." But by far the most important
expression of social class is in matters economic, and here the facts
all point the other way. As the veteran journalist Trudy Lieberman
reveals in Slanting the Story (2000),
a painstaking, methodical, well-researched, but completely overlooked
case-by-case study of American news decisions, polls consistently show
reporters to be conservative on crucial economic issues like Social
Security privatization, welfare reform, and NAFTA. Add to this the
influence of advertisers and publishers, who weight for-profit
journalism automatically to the right; the rise of avowedly
conservative cable news networks, stock market networks, and radio talk
shows; the screeching libertarianism of the Internet; and the
concerted, multi-million-dollar efforts of conservative foundations and
think tanks to push their ideas on the press, and the result is a media
universe that, like our bought politics, each year spins further off
into toryland.
Labor reporting, once a staple of big-city journalism, has disappeared
at all but a handful of American newspapers. Foreign affairs reporters
(led by Tom Friedman, the influential columnist for the New York Times)
increasingly accept free market globalization theory, reflexively
blaming the problems of other lands on their failure to be more like
the entrepreneurial U.S. Wall Street stock analysts, despite their
obvious interests in low wages and weak environmental protections, are
routinely quoted by the American press as impartial economic
authorities on every imaginable subject. And by far the greatest media
myth of the last decade—if not the last century—was not heterosexual
AIDS but the "New Economy," that vision of a capitalist golden age that
sent so many off to plank down their life savings on Amazon, Enron, and
JDS Uniphase. And with the opium dream of Dow 36,000 shattered,
Americans are finally ready to think about the downside of free
markets, about the ugly realities of social class. It is a measure of
American intellectual dysfunction that gripes like Bias are what constitute our literature of dissent.
——————————————
1This
is a persistent problem for conservative writers. Think of Bill
O’Reilly’s ludicrous claim to be a member of the working class because
his dad was a corporate accountant who lived in Levittown. Or . . .
——————————————
First appeared in the March 21, 2002 issue of the London Review of Books.
