Slanted Press or Slanted Blogs?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 12:39 PM

I was going to lead with Alito, but three hours of senators bloviating and a 10-minute opening statement? Yawn . That's bottom-of-the-column material.

If there's one topic that seems to perpetually pulsate through the blogosphere, and my e-mail in-box, and talk radio and cable shout shows, it's whether the Mainstream Media are crippled by bias.

There are now countless Web folks dedicating to blowing the cyberwhistle on what they see as slanted journalism. Many are conservatives disgusted by what they view as the media's left-wing tilt; others are liberals convinced the press is in bed with the Bush administration.

All this fact-checking, bird-dogging, scrutinizing and scolding is, in my opinion, a healthy thing for a news business that has been too arrogant and too remote for too long. Some of it is clearly cooked up by people pushing ideological agendas in the guise of press criticism. The good news is you get to decide what's valid and what's not.

There's a great punch-and-counterpunch exchange in California that I'm going to quote at unusual length (hey, doesn't cost me any more) to give you the full flavor. It begins with a blogger named Patterico doing a year-in-review of the Los Angeles Times:

"Only clueless people think the L.A. Times is completely unbiased. (Indeed, some especially clueless people, including a Harvard professor, think it's conservative!) Then again, it may depend upon what the meaning of 'conservative' is. For example, the L.A. Times's Tim Rutten is so far to the left, he thinks it's a 'myth' that Hollywood is liberal. But it was revealed in an interview with Hugh Hewitt than Rutten considers himself to be 'pretty conservative guy' because he goes to church, has remained married to the same woman his whole life, and takes care of kids. His consistently leftist views on virtually every issue under the sun apparently don't figure into the equation . . .

"When the paper labeled pieces 'news analysis,' the writers evidently felt free to editorialize to their hearts' content, as in a piece which dismissively stated: 'Bush has marched through his presidency championing causes held dear by one Republican Party faction or another.'

"The paper falsely reported that, in a major presidential foreign policy speech, the only applause had 'apparently' been sparked by a White House aide. It turned out the applause had actually been sparked by members of the military -- but reporting this fact might have made Bush look good.

"The paper exulted in the indictment of Tom DeLay, and downplayed evidence of partisanship by his prosecutor, Ronnie Earle -- including Earle's criticism of DeLay (then a target of Earle's investigation) at a Democratic fundraiser.

"If the paper was critical of Republicans, it was at least equally charitable to Democrats. For example, Ron Brownstein uncritically accepted Hillary Clinton's spin that she has truly become a 'centrist' -- ignoring her leftist views on a number of core liberal issues. Brownstein had been far more suspicious of similar claims by Bush in 2000. Two weeks later, the paper printed another Hillary-as-centrist article . . .

"Even after Bill Clinton left the Oval Office, the L.A. Times continued to protect his reputation."

All this drew an impassioned response from LAT writer Michael Hiltzik at his Golden State blog:

"The conservative blogger who calls himself Patterico (and is, behind the curtain, a Los Angeles county prosecutor named Patrick Frey) posted a remarkable 11,000-word work of propaganda in the guise of his annual review of the Los Angeles Times's alleged crimes of liberal bias.

"Frey, with whom I once had a perfectly cordial exchange by e-mail, claims to have documented 'an entire year's worth' of 'omissions, distortions, and misrepresentations' by this newspaper, and congratulates himself enthusiastically for making the effort. (Self-congratulation is a common characteristic of partisan blogs, like snouts on dogs.) As I will show in a follow-up post, Frey's exercise is chock-a-block with plenty of omissions, distortions, and misrepresentations of its own. But the details aren't my main topic today. Rather, I propose to examine the broader features of conservative criticism of the press.

"Frey has several qualities in common with many other right-wing bloggers who have set themselves up as watchdogs of what they categorize, self-revealingly, as the 'mainstream media.' . . . The class includes a wide range of conservative and reactionary blogs for which it's an article of faith that the traditional press is secretly devoted to inculcating the nation's innocent readers with their liberal agenda.

"None of these critics appears to be genuinely interested in correcting factual errors or improving this newspaper's, or any newspaper's, performance as a journalistic institution -- which are certainly legitimate goals. Their main purpose is to hunt down deviations from a political orthodoxy that they themselves define. Their techniques include a promiscuous use of labels as shorthand slurs ('leftist' and 'liberal' being, of course, their most popular denigrations). They no doubt find this technique valuable because once they can hang a label on a newspaper or a journalist, they can dispense with anything so fundamental as discussion or argument. Some also favor imputations of treason or unpatriotism; contentions that the offending reporters and editors are detached in spirit from their readership; and suggestions that what underlies their political deviancy is moral turpitude.

"To back up their assertions, they often quote articles selectively, take out of context what they do quote, and ascribe imaginary motivations to reporters and editors, which they then feel free to decry. As any student of history knows, these are tools and techniques that were used to great effect during the Stalinist show trials of the '40s and '50s. The functionaries who wielded them then had the same goals as the self-anointed press watchdogs on the right do today: To support the regime in power through intimidation and threat and to impose ideological conformity, while avoiding at all costs debate on the merits.

"These critics equate a newspaper's failure to parrot a conservative, Republican, or Bush Administration line with inaccuracy, or cavalierly interpret it as evidence of 'bias.' Unconcerned with a free press's duty to challenge official versions of events, they fault newspapers and newsmagazines for failing to fall into lockstep in support of George W. Bush and his policies . . .

"Such reveling in ignorance of one's subject is a new phenomenon in criticism. You don't hear movie critics bragging about never going to the cinema, TV critics dropping their cable subscriptions, or book critics swearing off reading. But it's not at all unusual to hear the blogging critics urge readers to cancel their subscriptions to their daily newspapers, as though their goal is to reduce their followers to the same state of blissful benightedness to which they aspire themselves."

All right, now to Alito . . . I agree with Keith Olbermann that it was like watching a 0-0 baseball game for two innings with plenty of rain delays.

"Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. began his public drive for a seat on the Supreme Court today by offering a reassurance of his belief that judges should have no agendas of their own," says the New York Times , "but he steered clear of any discussion about his views on abortion, presidential power and other divisive issues, setting up a more direct confrontation with Democrats on Tuesday over his suitability for the Supreme Court.

"On the opening day of the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Alito sketched his background and traced his outlook in part back to two influences: what he called the unpretentious community in New Jersey in which he grew up, and, by contrast, his students days at Princeton and Yale in the late 1960's and early 1970's, when, he said, he witnessed privileged students behaving irresponsibly.

"He chose not to extend that implied character description to whatever views he holds on the divisive issues that are likely to dominate the hearings in coming days, and instead set out only a very generalized description of a belief in the need for independent-minded jurists."

A majority of the public favors Alito's confirmation, by a 53-27 margin, says a Post-ABC poll .

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick : "All anyone can talk about is how darn humble John Roberts is, and poor Alito--who really is humble--just has to sit there and take it . . . Alito's own opening statement contains no central theme, image, or metaphor; no neat word-picture to sell his own jurisprudential views, unless, perhaps, it's this one: 'My family was too poor to afford a judicial philosophy.'"

Kos has this bit of media criticism: "The Alito hearings are covered on MSNBC, and they couldn't find a single Democrat or liberal to comment on them? Not one? Instead, they gave us Pat Buchanan, Ed Gillespie, and Bill Frist."

Another fine story that the media should have done long ago: USA Today says only 28 percent of federal fines against mining operators in the last seven years has actually been collected.

Editor & Publisher has the back story on why you haven't heard about the Christian Science Monitor reporter kidnapped in Iraq--until now:

"The abduction of a Christian Science Monitor reporter in Iraq on Saturday was not disclosed by major U.S. media outlets for nearly two days after the Monitor requested that the incident, and the reporter's name and affiliation, be withheld. A translator was killed in the incident and the reporter, now identified by the Monitor as Jill Carroll, is still being held.

"Numerous foreign news outlets and several leading wire services disclosed the incident -- and in a few cases, the reporter's name. Such stories did not appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other U.S. papers and their Web sites. The Associated Press ran at least one story out of Baghdad, but without the newspaper or reporter's name, and it did not appear in any major newspapers Sunday or Monday. The AP held off all further reports at the request of the Monitor, which did not release the information until Monday afternoon."

How is it that Rupert Murdoch's New York Post is no longer slicing and dicing Hillary daily. In the New Republic, Ben Smith credits "an active courtship on Clinton's part--including access for Post reporters. Unlike some politicians brutalized by the Post--notably this year's Democratic mayoral nominee, Fernando Ferrer--she and her staff never cut off the paper, however shrill it got. Her top campaign communications aide, Howard Wolfson, had arrived with a respect and understanding for the tabloid's power from his time with Westchester Representative Nita Lowey, whom he helped engineer into an unlikely Post favorite. Clinton's courtship of the paper has ranged from her warm relations with the paper's Capitol Hill staff--one former reporter, Vince Morris, was a particular favorite--to her keen awareness of some of the paper's favorite crusades . . .

"Last year, when the paper was wrapped up in an all-out assault on the International Freedom Center, a planned museum at Ground Zero that the Post warned would be a 'monster' and 'a forum for America-bashing,' Clinton joined in. Already under heavy fire, the project died--people involved say--the day Clinton came out against it in an interview with the Post. She got the wood, and an editorial labeled the move 'Hillary's home run.'

"The distance from the devious carpetbagger the Post portrayed in 2000 to the serious junior senator who, for the most part, occupies its pages today is hard to match in America's political press . . . Both sides, though, insist this is journalism as usual . . .

"Beyond these bromides is a realization by both Clinton and Murdoch that their relationship can be mutually beneficial. Murdoch's history with Prime Minister Tony Blair offers the blueprint: After then-candidate Blair flew to Australia's Hayman Island to address executives of Murdoch's News Corporation, Murdoch's British papers abandoned the Tories to support him. Murdoch would go on to benefit from Blair's media deregulation."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, while praising Tom DeLay for bowing out of the House leadership, scoffs at Denny Hastert's talk of lobbying reform:

"This is a junior-achievement version of what Democrats did in responding to the Clinton fund-raising scandals by adopting the cause of 'campaign-finance reform.' Why is it that whenever Congress gets into an ethics scrape, its first reaction is to further restrict the Constitutional rights of other Americans to influence Members of Congress? We can only hope these 'reforms' will be as trivial as they sound.

"The real House GOP problem isn't about lobbyists so much as it is the atrophying of its principles. As their years in power have stretched on, House Republicans have become more passionate about retaining power than in using that power to change or limit the federal government. Gathering votes for serious policy is difficult and tends to divide a majority. Re-election unites them, however, so the leadership has gradually settled for raising money on K Street and satisfying Beltway interest groups to sustain their incumbency.

"This strategy has maintained a narrow majority, but at the cost of doing anything substantial."

Scandals come and go, but K Street always rules.

I'm still hung up on the fiasco at the West Virginia mine, which I wrote about yesterday. Almost every journalist I've interviewed or seen interviewed says it wasn't the media's fault, we did the best we could, yadda yadda yadda. But there are a couple of exceptions, such as the Orlando Sentinel, as noted by ombudsman Manning Pynn :

"The Sentinel apologized on Thursday's front page for a headline and article in that space the day before, quoting relatives of 13 trapped West Virginia coal miners as saying, 'They're alive!' . . .

"The newspaper owed its readers that apology -- not because it generated, or even contributed to generating, the incorrect information. The apology was for delivering to readers information that misled them in a very prominent way about a very emotional issue."

At Raleigh's News & Observer, ombud Ted Vaden says:

"Let's concede to begin with that it was an awful error. To publish bad information of this magnitude is an editor's worst nightmare, and you can imagine the dismay of The N&O's top editors when they awoke to the real story Wednesday morning."

And USA Today took responsibility by running an editor's note:

"This documentation proved inadequate and fell short of USA TODAY's professional standards . . . USA TODAY regrets the errors."

Here's how not to win friends in the press, according to London's Guardian :

"American troops in Baghdad on Sunday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.

"Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.

"Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.

"The troops told Dr Fadhil that they were looking for an Iraqi insurgent and seized video tapes he had shot for the programme. These have not yet been returned."

GOP chairman Ken Mehlman sat down with Michelle Malkin, Captain Ed Morrissey and other conservative bloggers. Part of his message, says the Captain:

"1. Positive agenda for change -- Defending the status quo won't do.

"Need to be seen as reformers -- leadership already turning towards that. We need a smaller government to combat this kind of corruption. Reduce government, reduce corruption. But then how do we reform lobbying and government? Full and quicker disclosure. Keep in mind that what Jack Abramoff did was theft and kickbacks, and that should always be aggressively prosecuted."

Right Side Redux has a photo of the historic event.

By the way, I linked to a Raw Story piece last week suggesting that the Abramoff probe was sparked by an angry ex-girlfriend of Jack's partner Michael Scanlon. But my Post colleagues note that the paper reported the actual genesis in a February, 2004 article by Sue Schmidt:

"The FBI has stepped up an investigation into alleged spending irregularities by one of Abramoff's clients -- the 800-member Louisiana Coushatta tribe, which takes in hundreds of millions of dollars yearly from its casino."

Finally, Howard Stern 's satellite debut: "The F word was there, and a few others that can't be reprinted, but the show fell just short of a celebration of George Carlin's famed seven dirty words. In fact, Stern said he was limiting the use of expletives, although there were lapses."