Richard Nixon turned his simmering resentment against "the establishment" into a focused strategy against the press. In November 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered a speech denouncing it as a "small [and] unelected elite." He warned, "The views of the majority of this fraternity do not -- and I repeat, not -- represent the views of America." And he even cited Walter Lippmann as an authority against "monopoly" over public opinion.
After his landslide victory in 1972, Nixon urged the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to buy the Washington Post. Nixon's ploy launched Scaife on his subsequent crusade against "liberal media." In 1985, Scaife spent millions subsidizing a failed lawsuit by former general William Westmoreland against CBS News, trying to prove it had defamed him. (The same Scaife agents involved in that foray turned up later at the center of the $2.4 million Scaife-funded Arkansas Project of dirty tricks against President Clinton.)
As the Watergate scandal proved, Nixon's effort to demonize and isolate the press was part of his larger plan to formalize and institutionalize an imperial presidency. He sought an inherent power for the president to make war, declare national emergencies, nullify checks and balances by impounding funds at the president's discretion, create a system of secrecy, all rationalized by claims of national security. Checks and balances, oversight and accountability, exemplified by a rigorous press, were cast, following Agnew, as a fundamental threat to the country. From Nixon to George W. Bush, the impulse to build an unfettered executive has driven the essential struggle between the press and the presidency. The conservative movement's relentless campaign against "liberal bias" has been a lever to remove this check and balance.
The growth of a countervailing conservative media machine has also been a decisive political factor in mobilizing public opinion and insulating a part of it from contamination of "liberal bias." In October 2004, the University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes conducted a study, "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters," revealing that 72 percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD and that it had been proven, even though there had been extensive news reports from the Iraq Survey Group that it had found no WMD. Furthermore, 75 percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam was substantially helping al Qaeda, 63 percent believed that that evidence had been found, 60 percent believed that experts agreed with that conclusion, and 55 percent believed that the 9/11 Commission had proven the point, even though it proved exactly the opposite. Bush supporters did not hold these misperceptions because of inattention to the news. Another University of Maryland study, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," revealed that misperceptions varied significantly according to news sources and that higher levels of exposure to Fox News in particular compounded factual misperceptions and approval of Bush. Eighty percent of those who cited Fox News as a major source of their information suffered serious misperceptions, according to the study, compared to 23 percent citing National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.
"Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation," Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News. "The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information." Yet Lippmann assumed that the people were passive, acted upon by politically motivated elites. Today, about one-third of the public actively chooses sources of information that play to their prejudices. The readers, listeners, and viewers of the Drudge Report, the Rush Limbaugh show, and Fox News have consciously selected "the quack, the charlatan, the jingo" to seal themselves from objective information. The "breakdown of the means of public knowledge," as Lippmann called it, rests on a carefully cultivated preference for crank opinion over unsettling fact. The more reality defies this public's understanding, the more fervently it redoubles its resistance to it, embracing the distorted stereotype as the only true account.
The entrenchment and exploitation of this segment of public opinion has become big business and political necessity on the right. In May 2003, Matt Labash, a writer for the neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard (published by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News), explained how the conservative attack on "liberal bias" operated as a profitable game. "While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective," he said. "We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it actually."
The degree to which this "great little racket" has been accepted and assimilated by members of the press was expressed by Mark Halperin, then political editor of ABC News, in an appearance on a right-wing radio talk show in October 2006:
Many people I work with in ABC, and other old media organizations, are liberal on a range of issues. And I think the ability of that, the reality of how that affects media coverage, is outrageous, and that conservatives in this country for forty years have felt that, and that it's something that must change ... And news organizations putting their heads in the sand for forty years, and not caring that half the country thought we were too liberal and biased against them, was an insane business decision. But it was also insane to do from the point of view of what we're supposed to do as our core mission ... I don't know if it's 95 percent [the percentage of people with whom he works who are liberals], and unfortunately, they're not all old. There are a lot of young liberals here, too. But certainly, there are enough in the old media, not just in ABC, but in old media generally, that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction, which is completely improper.
"From our recent experience," wrote Lippmann, "it is clear that the traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation." Journalism must reconstruct itself for a new age, at least as urgently as in Lippmann's time. So far it has failed the tests of the new century. Nearly ninety years after Lippmann first assayed the crisis of journalism, it finds itself back at ground zero -- or in Lippmann's cave. Even some of the impassioned amateurs of the Internet have been more factually reliable on central issues than the most august news organizations. Their fear -- as readers, viewers, and influence seep away in the face of new technology -- has provoked more anxiety than self-examination. But journalism may yet be revitalized, as part of a general reawakening of American democracy that discovers new forms of expression and forces new debate to achieve its ends.
The filigree of wire, cathode-ray tubes, woofers and tweeters, satellite dishes, and printing presses are the same everywhere in a flat world. But Americans are wired differently. The freedom of the press is part of our Constitution, the first right, the First Amendment; and our democracy -- public policy, politics, commerce, and nation -- has been shaped by its exercise, its use, and its abuse.
In 1822, in a placid time, an "Era of Good Feelings," as it was called, James Madison was nonetheless eternally vigilant about liberty and the news. "A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both," he wrote. "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, writes a column for Salon and the Guardian of London. His new book is titled "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime." He is a senior fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security.
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)
