This the column that appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune Thursday, October 27, 2005:
No Questions Asked
Media’s coverage shows its ‘view form the top’ stance and lack of challenging authority
By Arthur Alpert
I’ve never forgotten a sports feature I read about a year ago. A local teen was overcoming - performing well as a jock and student - despite tough circumstances at home. Heartwarming. Until this from his coach: "He never questions authority."
Coach meant it as praise.
Authority is power, power exercised by the folks above us on the ladder. The ladder is how we organize institutions - government, courts, schools, churches, the army, business. This hierarchy inhabits our psyches, too.
We call folks with a view from the top the Establishment. As is only human, the Establishment uses its power to stay there, while people below – the middle class - scramble to join them or, at least, keep a distance from the scruffy fellas clinging to the lowest rungs.
Inevitably, the self-interest of those on top distorts the institution’s mission.
But you know this. I restate it only to set up my thesis - the news business is neither liberal nor conservative but an Establishment institution.
Consider "class." When’s the last time (before Katrina) that you read or watched serious coverage of the underclass? Or respectful words about a blue-collar union? Or serous analysis of the globalism – espoused by both parties – that’s exporting middle class jobs?
If you have, you subscribe to the Atlantic, National Review or American Prospect. There’s little in the mainstream press.
News institutions cannot avoid seeing the world through their class prejudices. I recognize the leanings in the New York Times, owned, written and edited by the governing class. (By contrast, the big-city daily I joined in 1960 employed several working class reporters).
Establishment bias explains the dearth of stories about the issue of our time – how corporate power threatens democracy. Did anybody even ask John Roberts, before appointing him chief justice of the United States, what he thinks of judicial decisions empowering corporations?
The Establishment is bipartisan. Democrats led us into Vietnam, Republicans kept us in. Establishment sons - not just President Bush’s but also Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s – elected the Texas Air National Guard. We drafted working class kids to brave the rice paddies.
Iraq divides the Establishment but both Republicans and Democrats marketed our misadventure.
And the press acquiesced.
The Establishment is tolerant of mild dissent, but not passionate about free thought; ergo, its news mediums explore the gamut of ideas from A to B. Yet there’s a good deal of fine journalism in great national dailies like the Times and Wall Street Journal, newsmagazines and our local newspapers. Broadcasting, too – think PBS’s "Frontline" and "Nova" and NPR.
Step back from the canvas for perspective, though, and you see that excellence drowning in a tsunami - bits and pieces of data, gobs of celebrity junk, ignorant talk and black holes of omission, sound and fury signifying nothing. No, not nothing – signifying camouflage for Establishment malfeasance.
I wish I knew how to fix this. New information technology may help; already the blogosphere is inspiring print journalists to rethink.
Liberals and conservatives recently united to stall a Federal Communications Commission effort to centralize broadcasting further. Americans should next re-regulate, break up the behemoths, encourage more voices. To do so, we’ll have to buy back our democracy by financing elections ourselves.
Perhaps George Clooney’s new movie, wherein Edward R. Murrow questions power in a time of fear, will remind everybody the First Amendment wasn’t written to maximize profit. It’s for questioning authority.
Sorry, coach.
Alpert is a semi-retired newsman in Albuquerque. Email him at ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column appears in Insight & Opinion the fourth Thursday of the month.
Sometimes the editorial and Op Ed pages fascinate.
The mourning over the resignation of Fed Chief Alan Greenspan has shocked if not surprised me – he did so many things so very wrong for most Americans.
Finally, this morning, the Albuquerque Journal published E.J. Dionne Jr.’s column on Greenspan and his successor in which Dionne, a liberal, voiced some adverse criticism of the guy. Weak tea, I thought.
Over on the next page, meanwhile, the Journal published the kind of Letter to the Editor newspapers pray for – a somewhat unhinged right-winger accusing the Journal staff of leftwing bias. In the process, he located Dionne as
"left of Lenin." I found it funny. I hope the Journal editorial folks don’t take it as evidence they are doing something right.
The Journal also published an article from the LA Times by one Dahlia Lithwick – stupendous name! – identified as Slate’s Supreme Court reporter. It’s the clearest piece I have read on the intra-right wing donnybrook over the President's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Interesting, too, that the author - lodged at an Internet enterprise is valued by the mainstream press.
Also on that page, Jeanne Pahls, a local anti-nuke crusader, suggests that Albuquerque get rid of the WMD stored here rather than make futile disaster preparations. Her third paragraph made me sit up and take notice:
"If Albuquerque were to secede from the union, it would immediately become our planet’s third largest nuclear power."
That should have been the lead to the piece, no?
Meanwhile, back on the editorial page, Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald says neither better law enforcement nor a guest worker program will solve the problem of illegal immigration from Latin America. The only solution - reduce the pay gap between Latino and American workers.
He suggests doing that via economic integration, based on what Western Europe did after WWII. I have no idea if that’s sensible or possible, but surely his basic argument is correct – you cannot stop mass immigration, you can only work to keep immigrants at home.
Give the Journal credit for publishing a piece demonstrating original thinking, quite outside the parameters of the immigration debate.
On Friday, Oct. 14, the Albuquerque Tribune ran a story by Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press, It started at the bottom of the front page.
"Retiree checks to get a 4.1% bump" was the headline. A sub-head noted that the Social Security COLA might not offset seniors' higher Medicare premiums and energy costs. The story continued inside, on page 9, to go into detail.
Three paragraphs from the bottom, in backgrounding, Crutsinger noted that President Bush "had hoped to get Congress this year to pass" an overhaul. And he continued, in the next--to-last paragraph:
"It would have bolstered Social Security finances to deal with a looming funding crisis when 78 million baby boomers begin retiring...."
That's perfectly incorrect. Perfectly. The Bush proposal would not have "bolstered" the system. Nor was there or is there a "looming funding crisis" in Social Security. (That is close to an accurate description of Medicare.)
If, in fact, the Bush proposal had bolstered Social Security finances, it might have garnered more support in the Congress. (In the last paragraph, the reporter notes it never "attracted widespread support" there.)
Question - how does this stuff happen? Where do reporters find this kind of misinformation? (A White House position paper, maybe?) Why doesn't the reporter exercise his critical faculties? And why don't editors spot these big, fat errors?
Finally, what is the effect on readers? Won't those who read to the end believe what they read? (It was done so matter-of-factly that I almost bought it.)
Beats me.
Judging from the columns I have read over the years and his appearances on TV talk shows, David Broder is a decent guy, thoughtful, well-meaning and modest.
His column in today’s Albuquerque Journal reminds me, though, of his limitations. Since he is vaguely liberal, they are limitations that apply, I fear, to many liberals and the Democratic Party.
Broder reports that two political scientists formerly in the Clinton White, House have drawn a road map to power. It is centrist, he reports, and won’t easily be accepted by the organizations that "control the Democratic party at the grassroots and dominate its fundraising, whether they be Hollywood millionaires or Internet Deaniacs."
It seems these folks "yearn for candidates who would reverse Bush’s direction on everything from Iraq to taxes to gay rights and abortion."
How terrible!
Note, please, that Broder has told us the party should be run by neither its rank-and-file members (grassroots) nor its millionaires. This leaves? Elected officials and other professional politicians in Washington and elsewhere. Yes, the same folks who brought us Al Gore and John Kerry!
Also, that Broder is bieng "practical," shunting policy aside or changing it to win.
Thus, Broder goes on to tell us the political scientists say the party must revise "Democratic doctrine on both national security and social/moral issues."
(If there is Democratic doctrine on national security, I don’t know what it is. Sadly, it's clear the party does not oppose the war on its merits.)
Why revise those doctrines? Because, says Broder, the perceptions that Democrats are weak on terrorism and hostile to the religious has cost them a lot of Catholic votes, particularly Catholic women’s votes.
Conclusion: find a Roman Catholic, preferably a Midwesterner because the experts point out that Midwestern states can swing an election. Somebody with a solid marriage, who goes to church and can express sympathy with those who hate abortion and gay rights.
In other words, Kerry was a stiff. Agreed, but recommending a live candidate is hardly political analysis, no less a path to power.
Broder tells us Tom Vilsack of Iowa, who is Roman Catholic, and Evan Bayh of Indiana, Protestant but otherwise qualified, might fit the bill. He’s less enamoured of Hillary Clinton.
And there you have Broder’s recipe for regaining power. No matter that it takes no account of the GOP’s rightward drift under Bush Jr, leaving Democrats to follow Republicans to the right. Or that it positions the Democrats so close to the Republicans that voters may – once again – decide Republicans can do Republicanism better.
It’s the Clinton strategy all over again – triangulate, find a place between your opponents and your party base. Broder knows it worked for Bill Clinton, but it seems to have escaped him that it’s failed twice since.
Further, he never mentions that the Democratic Party became feeble under Clinton. Or that Clinton’s agenda was only nominally Democratic. What’s the point of winning power to push Republican policies?
Nor does Broder mention the virtue of believing in something, an advantage for George W. Bush in two elections.
But here's the crux of the matter - nowhere in his column does Broder mention corporate power. Surely, it’s obvious that the question before our nation is shall we regain our imperfect democracy or give up, accepting the continued domination of Corporate America? If so, that oversight demonstrates the full bankruptcy of Broder’s thinking. Of liberal thinking, maybe, in 2005.
How many elections must Democrats lose before they decide to offer a choice, not an echo.
I have appreciated David Brooks' conservative commentary. He works hard to expound his thinking, which is more conservative than right-wing weird, and he writes well, too.
In a New york Times column reproduced in the Albuquerque Tribune yesterday, Brooks leads this way: "After a while, you get sick of the DeLays of the Right and the Deans of the left."
Et tu, Brooks?
These guys are supposed to be parallel figures on the right and left?
But Dean is famous for balancing Vermont's budgets and getting along with the NRA. It's true he extended health insurance to almost everybody in his state, but he did so without recourse to a single-payer plan.
Oh, yes, he did say straight out that the US attack on Iraq was a diversion from the "war on terror," but that's the Establishment view, isn't it?
DeLay, on the other hand, wants Washington - meaning Big Government - to intervene in families' life-and-death decisions about their ill children or spouses.
Oh, and yes, he's been chastised by GOP-dominated House ethics panels. And yes, he's under indictment for breaking campaign finance laws.
So where's the parallel?
I hate to doubt Brooks' intellectual honesty, but starting right now, I do. I will harbor the hope, though, that an upset stomach or headache impeded thought the day he wrote that column.
I guess the headline rule - you take your cue from the lead sentence or paragraph - still holds. So I will not charge the headline writer at the Albuquerque Journal who put "Roberts Attacks Suicide Law" with a felony, just a misdeanor.
Gina Holland's AP story Oct. 6 opens like this:
"New Chief Justice John Roberts stepped forward Wednesday as an agggressive defender of federal authority to block doctor-assisted suicide, as the Supreme Court clashed over an Oregon law that lets doctors help terminally ill patients end their lives."
Come on now - justices use oral presentations to learn and hone their thinking on the legal issues before them. Their questions may or may not reflect their opinions. Holland cannot know which. I am surprised her editor didn't intervene.
And the headline writer deserves a slap on the wrist for failing to question the lead.
On Oct. 1, the Albuquerque Tribune ran a story on the ballot proposal to raise the minimum wage. In it, reporter Erik Siemers characterized the Air America radio network as "far left."
I call it liberal.
Far-left would be a proper description of Noam Chomsky, maybe. But Al Franken?
I have no idea why Siemers wrote that. Or how it got past the editors. Probably
just a too-quick judgment.
I offer both comments to make the point that journalism suffers more from failing to live up to its own standards than from bias.