Monday, June 16, 2003

Jonah Goldberg swats that little whiner, Eric Alterman
Big Dumb Lie: Is anyone fooled by claims that the media aren't liberal?:
Mr. Alterman looks to the handful of conservative media outlets and ignores the horde of liberal ones. He fulminates about the influence of the "wild men" at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for instance, but barely mentions New York Times editorialists. Indeed, at times it seems Mr. Alterman has never even heard that the Times exists, let alone that it is both extremely liberal and more influential than any other news organ.

Mr. Alterman rails against the conservative perfidy of Fox News, yet sees little to no evidence that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN or MSNBC might be liberal. Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Harper's, NPR, etc. don't warrant much attention or worry. But he insists that the (vastly tinier) Weekly Standard has dangerous influence.

The Bradley, Olin and Scaife foundations are said to be wreaking havoc on the gullible masses. But the (hugely richer and highly liberal) Ford, Rockefeller and Pew foundations don't merit any mention at all. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are claimed to pull the country to the right, but Harvard, Berkeley, etc. seem to have no gravitational mass at all in his eyes. It's as if Mr. Alterman scans the whole political landscape through the lenses of some novelty glasses which can only pick up conservatives.
...
Keep in mind that Eric Alterman is media critic for The Nation--a hysterically left-wing magazine dedicated to the proposition that corporate America, U.S. foreign policy and the Republican Party are criminal, racist or both. The simple reality is that, for him, the Democratic Party is far too conservative.
...
This raises one of Mr. Alterman's biggest problems. He simply dismisses the proven fact that the vast majority of journalists admit they are liberal. When nine out of 10 reporters state in a survey that they voted for Bill Clinton, Mr. Alterman counters that Mr. Clinton wasn't very liberal, and that if he had run for president in, say, Belgium or Germany he'd be considered conservative. That's a debatable point, but it doesn't change the fact that in America the press corps clusters almost entirely at one end of our political spectrum, consistently voting for the most liberal candidate available. If it keeps Mr. Alterman up at night to think that our liberals are to the right of liberal Swedes, let that be his white whale.
It's whacked out Capt. Eric at the helm of the Pequod. "Thar she blows!"