At National Review Online today, Stephen Spruiell of NRO's Media Blog reviews a new book charging the liberal media are a pound full of poodles for the White House. It's like a modern-day reworking of Mark Hertsgaard's Reagan-era tract On Bended Knee -- the last time an author wrote a laugh-out-loud expose of the supposedly wimpy/conservative national media sucking up to a president:
Eric Boehlert would freak out if you were to point out to him how much his book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush reads like a mirror image of the conservative press criticism he despises. According to Boehlert, the “fear of conservative press critics”—or “The Press Haters” as he calls them (us) in a chapter by that name—is one of the factors that brought about the mainstream media’s transformation from the snarling, merciless pit bulls of the Clinton years to the cowardly, right-leaning lapdogs of today. If Boehlert’s book itself could be considered an argument, it would be that the Left must emulate these critics so that the media will stop being “[a]fraid of the facts and the consequences of reporting them.”
Boehlert argues, of course, that there’s a world of difference between organizations like the liberal Media Matters for America—“whose work I relied on extensively”—and the conservative Media Research Center, which he lumps in with the press haters.
The distinction, Boehlert writes, is that the press haters want to “dismantle journalism” and “create confusion about facts, while simultaneously undermining news consumers’ confidence in the MSM.” They “aren’t interested in thoughtful analysis or improving the craft of journalism”—which, Boehlert implies, separates them from reasonable, thoughtful press critics such as himself. People like him just want the media to start reporting “the facts”—that’s all.
The trouble is, for every passage in which Boehlert catalogues the media’s failure to “report the facts,” I could produce an equal and opposite passage arguing the same thing from a conservative viewpoint.
Spruiell noted that Boehlert is offended by Jack Abramoff stories that suggest the Abramoff scandal is bipartisan -- and then added that here at NewsBusters, Brent Baker just made the point that CBS's Gloria Borger claimed that William Jefferson's bribery scandal was bad for both parties.
We would also rebut Boehlert, a long-time Salon.com writer who also writes for Rolling Stone, by suggesting that some conservative critics are much more generous than he is in believing that there are points of media criticism that both left and right can agree on (at least occasionally and situationally) about improving the craft of journalism: less anonymous sourcing, more attention to detail, less ratings-obsessed fluff, and so on. To simply paint with a broad brush -- and insist that conservatives favor "dismantling journalism" and oppose the distribution of "the facts" -- sounds like it belongs in a leftist direct-mail fundraising letter, not a serious nonfiction book.
