Backlash on the Left

It's official: The Democrats are fed up with the press.

From the day George W. Bush won the Florida recount, resentment toward the MSM has been building on the left, to the point where it may well match the intensity on the right. Liberal bias? Ha! These journalists roll over for conservatives and beg to have their tummies scratched .

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Nation Editor Katrina van den Heuvel told me that the failure to adequately cover the Downing Street memo "epitomizes the timidity, the cowardice of a media that has been manipulated, intimidated, bullied by an administration that has taken it to a high level." Frank Rich says the episode lays bare the problems of the "lapdog news media."

Hillary Clinton, who wasn't terribly happy with the way she and her husband were covered in the last administration, joined the press-bashers last week: "I mean, it's shocking when you see how easily they fold in the media today. They don't stand their ground. You know, if they are criticized by the White House, they just fall apart. I mean, come on, toughen up, guys. It's only our Constitution and our country at stake. Let's get some spine going here."

Rep. John Conyers has held a hearing on the media's shortcomings in covering the administration and has been on a tear about the Downing Street Memo.

"In all of my years in Congress," he writes on Huffingtonpost.com, "I have never seen a phenomenon develop and grow like the controversy over these now infamous minutes, and the related corroboration. Just over the weekend, we finally made the front page of the Washington Post. The London Times also covered the disclosure of new British memos confirming the pre-war deal and highlighting the lack of a post-war plan. Is it any wonder the public is finally saying we never should have gotten in to begin with? I have also scheduled a hearing for this Thursday, and I am getting scores of press calls a day on this issue every day.

"Most amazingly, more than 540,00 Americans have joined with me in signing a letter to the president demanding answers and accountability."

And Nancy Pelosi spoke to the liberal blog Raw Story :

"House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) lauded blogs for their role in raising the profile of the Downing Street memo, and extolled their ability to present unvarnished facts in an age where media focuses on sound bites.

"While also raising what she herself described as a 'litany' of core Democratic issues -- such as education, healthcare and the environment -- the House Democratic leader made striking comments about the mainstream media, even asserting that reporters had told her journalists couldn't tell the Democrats' story because they feared losing access.

" 'I've had reporters say to me, I have orthodontia, I have tuition, I have mortgage, I need access, I'm not writing your story,' Pelosi remarked. . . .

" 'If you depend on the print press, they will either leave you out of the story, or mischaracterize what you are saying, or you get two sentences in a twenty-five paragraph story which doesn't give weight to the argument that you have.' "

Some thoughts: I seriously doubt that journalists told Pelosi they needed to maintain "access" to the administration to pay their mortgages, since even the best reporters have little inside access to the Bushies, who generally read from the same set of talking points. When The Post asked Peolsi, she said one younger reporter had said this -- one probably too young to have a mortgage.

But I sympathize with Pelosi about the Democratic position being reduced to two sentences in many stories. With Republicans running everything in D.C., the minority party often gets short shrift. The Republicans had the same problem in '93 and '94. Lacking that White House megaphone makes a huge difference.

A wide range of critics, including the ombudsmen of the NYT and WP, say the press bobbled the ball on the Downing Street Memo. The memo may not be the slam-dunk about the Bush administration fixing intelligence that its supporters believe -- the British author cites no specifics as proof -- but it was a newsworthy and provocative development, as the press is belatedly realizing.

In the case of Hillary's criticism, is she trying to work the media refs as she gears up for 2008? Maybe. But the tone of her comments -- calling the press spineless -- suggests she strongly believes this, as, undoubtedly, does her base.

The bottom line is this: There's still a huge amount of post-Iraq anger out there toward Bush, and liberals are frustrated that the red part of the country doesn't share their view. So the press must be doing a lousy job, right?

The press performance in covering this tightly disciplined administration has been far from perfect, especially on Iraq. But it's worth remembering that during the Clinton years, it was conservatives who saw the media as being embarrassingly soft on the White House.

The president, meanwhile, is ratcheting up the rhetoric:

"A fired-up President Bush last night took a new, more combative stance against Democrats impeding his policies, charging they 'stand for nothing' and 'follow the agenda of the roadblock,' " reports the New York Post .

How unpopular is the press? Dan Kennedy observes that this Editor & Publisher story on the latest Gallup poll leads with the news that public confidence in the media continues to slide. E&P reports:

"Those having a 'great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in newspapers dipped from 30% to 28% in one year, the same total for television. The previous low for newspapers was 29% in 1994. Since 2000, confidence in newspapers has declined from 37% to 28%, and TV from 36% to 28%, according to the poll.

"But wait! Near the bottom of the article is this:

"Confidence in the presidency plunged from 52% to 44%, with Congress and the criminal-justice system also suffering 8% drops. Confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court fell from 46% to 41%. The 22% confidence rating for Congress is its lowest in eight years, and self-identified Republicans have only a slightly more positive view of the institution than do Democrats.

"The military topped the poll with a 74% confidence rating, with the police at 63% and organized religion at 53%. Big business and Congress (both at 22%) and HMOs (17%) brought up the rear.

"In other words, the public may detest the news media, but not as much as it detests congressmen, masters of the universe, and their health-insurance providers. This isn't much of a silver lining, but it's something, I suppose."

Now here's a shock. Remember that American Petroleum Institute guy hired by the White House, who began watering down government reports on climate change? He quit after the New York Times disclosed his role and now, the paper reports :

"Philip A. Cooney, the White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for ExxonMobil in the fall, the oil company said today."

Senate capitalism at work, as explained by the Los Angeles Times :

"Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) made $822,000 last year from the sale of a controversial real estate investment with an Anchorage developer who had obtained a huge federal contract with his help, records show.

"In 1997, Stevens invested $50,000 with developer Jonathan B. Rubini. Last year, at Stevens' request, Rubini and his partner bought back the senator's interests in their deals for $872,000, according to Senate financial disclosure forms made public Tuesday."

Not exactly a deal available to the average person.

Slate's Tim Noah uses a shakeup of the LAT edit page to prescribe an even greater shakeup than "my friend and former boss Michael Kinsley's plan to have outsiders write some of the L.A. Times' editorials. It's a question best put in the past tense. The institutional voice of the Los Angeles Times was always something of a fiction. Whose opinions were these, anyway? A small team of editorialists couldn't possibly represent the views of something as sprawling as a large newspaper staff; and anyway, convention dictated that said staff wasn't supposed to have (or at least express) views at all. During my six years as a reporter in the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, my opinions were nearly always in opposition to the line laid down by the Journal's conservative editorial page, and the same held for most of the other reporters I knew, too.

"The editorial page has never really represented the opinions of the newspaper's owners, either, unless you're prepared to believe that the typical newspaper owner formulated on a daily basis three or four detailed opinions on matters of local, national, or international significance. (I'm lucky if I can come up with one opinion a day, and I don't bear responsibility for paying Slate's bills.) The L.A. Times didn't become a good newspaper until the publisher, Otis Chandler, started ignoring the broadly reactionary impulses of the other owners within the Chandler family. . . .

"Another reason we haven't yet seen the withering away of the editorial page is that its elimination depends not only on the imagination and guts of editorial page editors to buck respectable opinion but also on the willingness of these editors to eliminate their own jobs ."

But isn't there something to be said for a news organization taking a stand, even if that stand is determined by an effete corps of impudent writers?

Is this the new world? Imus rips Tucker Carlson and his former newswoman, Contessa Brewer, and Crooks and Liars provides the MSNBC video. Now we really can just see the good parts of almost anything.

Josh Marshall is exercised about this front-page Washington Post article by Dan Eggen and Julie Tate.

"The upshot of the piece is fairly straightforward. In the push for the renewal of the Patriot Act, the president and other administration officials have been publicly and volubly claiming that the administration's tough anti-terrorism tactics have resulted in some 400 terrorism-related indictments, with more than half of those leading to convictions.

"Only, as Eggen and Tate point out, that's not true.

"The president is telling people his administration has nabbed some 400 terrorists. But actually the overwhelming majority of the cases don't involve terrorists in any way. They're people who got swept up in this or that terrorist investigation and then got nabbed for some immigration violation or false statement to investigators."

Marshall is concerned enough that he continues the conversation at his new TPM Cafe "The Post authors used the phrase 'misleading at best' to characterize a claim that really amounted to a deliberate misstatement of fact. In response I received this note from a staff writer at a well-known regional daily in the US. . . .

"This is a response to your criticism of journalists who don't call a lie a lie. As a journalist myself, I'm sensitive to this. I agree we can do better and not offer false equivalence, like saying there's a scientific debate over evolution and intelligent design when there is no scientific debate, only a political one. During the recent presidential campaign, reporters could have perhaps been more forceful in their language dealing with campaign statements and their factuality. But I think you're asking too much of reporters to label something as lies when its just misleading, even if highly so. In this case, George Bush's statement is factually defensible, but meant to give a false impression."

Andrew Sullivan dumps on Sean Hannity's sitdown with the veep:

"The problem is not Hannity's bias; it's his worship of those in power. Here's his question on immigration:

" I take calls from people three hours a day on the radio. One issue that people keep coming back -- I would say probably the conservative movement in the country, the one criticism they have, the biggest criticism they have of the administration is the issue of immigration and border patrol. We know the border patrol admits that there are 4 or 5 million people that they know that they don't get every year that cross the border. And people express their concern about the vulnerability and susceptibility of our borders. Your thoughts?

"Your thoughts? Can you get a more puff-ball gentle volley across the net? It's great to have conservatives in the media. But there's a difference between conservatives and supine vessels for government spin."

National Review's Jim Geraghty wonders if Cheney struck the right tone:

"If the case against Dean is that he's harsh, he's snide, he's disrespectful, is the right countermove to have the Vice President say, 'Maybe his mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does'?

"Cheney says 'He's never won anything, as best I can tell,' but we know Dean's been elected governor of Vermont a slew of times. The rest of us may find that state a little weird, but that doesn't mean being the governor isn't a real elected position.

"On the other hand, if Republicans are enjoying Dean's reign, and they want to make sure he doesn't get replaced as DNC chair, is there a better way to make sure Democrats keep him than to have Cheney say Dean is 'not the kind of individual you want to have representing your political party'?"

Walter Shapiro provides some baseball irony:

"No billionaire makes the president feel as bilious as George Soros, the ardent funder of defoliate-Bush campaign groups and the inspiration of many statewide medical marijuana initiatives. When it comes to White House liberal-phobia, Soros comes across as Ted Turner with real money.

"Soros recently added a new nettle to his nettlesome reputation by emerging as a major financial backer of a consortium out to buy the front-running, nine-game-winning-streak Washington Nationals, an orphan team owned by the other 29 major-league franchises. The dramatic return of baseball to the nation's capital (34 years after the hapless Senators relocated to, yes, Texas) is fast creating a new slogan: 'Washington -- last in post-war occupations, last in peace, but miraculously first in the National League East.' Now as a free-market Republican, George W. Bush, of course, believes in the inalienable right of any billionaire, freed from the burden of taxes, to buy any plaything he might desire. That is, unless the thing of beauty is a baseball franchise, located just a few miles from where the president presides over the only Secret-Service-secured Tee-Ball league in the world . . .

"It would be so much fun on opening day 2006 to see our baseball-loving president sitting in the owners box of the Washington Nationals, right next to his arch-nemesis George Soros."

And in the about-time category, the AP reports:

"Michael Jackson's lawyer said yesterday that the pop star is going to be more careful from now on and not let children into his bed anymore because 'it makes him vulnerable to false charges.' "

Ya think?