What Liberal Media? (Page 3)

This article was adapted from Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic), published in February (www.whatliberalmedia.com).

Consider the case of Howard Kurtz. By virtue of his responsibilities at CNN as host of Reliable Sources and at the Washington Post as its media reporter and columnist, Kurtz is widely recognized as the most influential media reporter in America, akin to the top cop on the beat. There is no question that Kurtz is a terrifically energetic reporter. But all media writers, including myself, walk a difficult line with regard to conflicts of interest. As a reporter and a wide-ranging talk-show host, Kurtz, unlike a columnist, cannot choose simply to ignore news. What's more, the newspaper for which he writes cannot help but cover CNN, the network on which he appears, and vice versa, as they both constitute 800-pound gorillas in the media jungle. Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. says he thinks "the problem is endemic to all media reporters. Everyone in the media universe is a competitor of the Washington Post, and so it's impossible to avoid conflicts of interest. Either we tell him the only people he can cover is The Nation or we set up this unique rule for him that he has to identify his relationship with whomever he writes about." Downie may be right. But the system didn't work perfectly when Kurtz covered Walter Isaacson's resignation from CNN recently. He wrote a tougher piece on Isaacson than most, which is fine, and noted that he worked for CNN at the end, but did not note that the network brass--meaning, presumably, Isaacson--had just cut his airtime in half. (Kurtz later explained this in an online chat.)

Regarding the political coloration of his work, it is no secret to anyone in the industry that CNN has sought to ingratiate itself with conservatives in recent years as it has lost viewers to Fox. Shortly after taking the reins, in the summer of 2001, Isaacson initiated a number of moves designed to enhance the station's appeal to conservatives, including a high-profile meeting with the Congressional Republican leadership to listen to their concerns. The bias reflected in Kurtz's work at the Post and CNN would be consistent with that of a media critic who had read the proverbial writing on the wall.

Whatever his personal ideology may be, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, based on an examination of his work, that Kurtz loves conservatives but has little time for liberals. His overt sympathy for conservatives and their critique of the media is, given the power and influence of his position, not unlike having the police chief in the hands of a single faction of the mob. To take just one tiny example of many in my book What Liberal Media?, Kurtz seemed to be working as a summer replacement for Ari Fleischer when Bush's Harken oil shenanigans briefly captured the imagination of the Washington press corps, owing to the perception of a nationwide corporate meltdown during the summer of 2002. Over and over Kurtz demanded of his guests:

"Why is the press resurrecting, like that 7-million-year-old human skull, this thirteen-year-old incident, in which Bush sold some stock in his company Harken Energy?"

"Laura Ingraham, is this the liberal press, in your view, trying to prove that Bush is soft on corporate crime because he once cut corners himself?"

"Regulators concluded he did nothing improper. Now, there may be some new details, granted, but this is--is this important enough to suggest, imply or otherwise infer, as the press might be doing, Molly Ivins, that this is somehow in a league with Tyco or WorldCom or Enron?"

"Is there a media stereotype Bush and Cheney, ex-oilmen, ex-CEOs in bed with big business that they can't shake?"

"Are the media unfairly blaming President Bush for sinking stock prices? Are journalists obsessed with Bush and Cheney's business dealings in the oil industry, and is the press turning CEOs into black-hatted villains?"

"If you look at all the negative media coverage, Rich Lowry, you'd think that Bush's stock has crashed along with the market. Is he hurting, or is this some kind of nefarious media creation?"

"And why is that the President's fault? Is it his job to keep stock prices up?"

Kurtz even went so far as to give credence to the ludicrous, Limbaugh-like insistence that somehow Bill Clinton caused the corporate meltdown of the summer of 2002. Kurtz quoted these arguments, noting, "They say, well, he set a bad example for the country. He showed he could lie and get away with it, so is that a reverse kind of 'Let's drag in the political figure we don't like and pin the tail on him?'" It was, as his guest Martha Brant had to inform him, "a ridiculous argument," surprising Kurtz, who asked again, "You're saying there's no parallel?" Recall that this is the premier program of media criticism hosted by the most influential media reporter in America. It did not occur to Kurtz to note, for instance, as Peter Beinart did, that Clinton vetoed the 1995 bill that shielded corporate executives from shareholder lawsuits (when every single Republican voted to override him), or that Clinton's Securities and Exchange Commission chief wanted to ban accounting firms from having consulting contracts with the firms they were also auditing. Thirty-three of thirty-seven members of Congress who signed their names to protests against the Clinton SEC were also Republican. The man who led the effort was then-lobbyist Harvey Pitt, whom George W. Bush chose to head the SEC and who was later forced to resign. But to Kurtz it is somehow a legitimate, intelligent question whether Clinton's lying about getting blowjobs in the Oval Office was somehow responsible for the multibillion-dollar corporate accounting scandal his Administration sought to prevent.

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