Seven Events That Made America America (35 page)

Eron Shosteck, in his April 27, 2000, column, “Pencil Necks,” for the
National Journal
, conducted an extensive Nexis database search to find out how balanced the political terminology in journalism really was.
⁸⁸
The term “partisan Republican” appeared 85 times in a ninety-day period, whereas “partisan Democrat” only appeared 58 times in the same three-month span. Use of the term “hard right” (683 times) and “far right” (267) appeared more than twice as often as “hard left” (312) or “far left” (130). Worse, when searching for references to “extreme right,” the database search collapsed because it exceeded 1,000 citations, whereas a search for “extreme left” only produced 58 hits. It was perfectly acceptable for a journalist to label a Republican as “far-right” or “ultra-conservative,” but sometime in the 1980s, major news organizations ceased calling Communist dictators (such as Mikhail Gorbachev) “dictators” and instead referred to them as “leaders.” A more detailed study of the use of language by “the elite press of the nation” (
New York Times
,
Wall Street Journal
,
Washington Post
,
Christian Science Monitor
, and the
Los Angeles Times
), covering an astounding 1,500 articles from January 1, 1990, to July 15, 1998, contrasted coverage of the National Rifle Association with Handgun Control, Inc., the NAACP, the ACLU, and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).
⁸⁹
Researchers also identified subtle uses of pejorative labels for the NRA, such as “rich and paranoid,” loaded verbs of attribution (“claims” or “contends” rather than “said”), and adjectives to discredit sources.

What was the reading or viewing public’s response to such blatant bias? People stopped reading newspapers and watching television news. The declines in audiences were so titanic that by 2009, more people tuned in to Rush Limbaugh’s show than to all of the top three broadcast news shows combined. Media elites rationalized that the decline was caused by the fact that the “appetite for news is slipping—from 53 percent in 1994 who closely followed the news to 45 percent.”
⁹⁰
Fox News, the only nonliberal news organization in existence, eclipsed the more established and better-funded CNN in June 2000 across the board in what Matt Drudge called a “cable quake.”
⁹¹
CNN’s ratings had crashed, dropping 28 percent in daily viewership and 16 percent in prime time during the first three quarters of 2000, when Fox News witnessed a 42 percent prime-time increase.
⁹²
After the 2000 presidential election, Fox News trounced its cable competition for inauguration coverage, averaging a 2.5 rating to CNN’s 2.0 and MSNBC’s 1.6.
⁹³
CNN barely beat Fox in total households—by fewer than 2 million homes, despite being available to 23 million more homes. But it was across the board. One quarter of all California television viewers hated the local news so much that they avoided the news altogether.
⁹⁴

And yet, the response of mainstream television news people like Jim Lehrer was predictable: the
audience
was nuts. When asked about bias, Lehrer informed “news” guru Stephen Colbert, “If you think we’re biased this proves you’re the one who’s really biased.”
⁹⁵
This astounding comment was little more than a reformulation of the justification given for dismissing anything said by a patient at a mental ward: “If you don’t agree with me, you have to be crazy!” Worse, this was the same underlying philosophy that enabled the Soviet Union to put any dissenters in loony bins on the basis that no one in their right mind can dislike communism. Bernard Goldberg provided an apt metaphor: “How would fish know they’re wet? Fish have no frame of reference.
They only know wet
.”
⁹⁶

A useful exercise to understand media bias is merely to look at the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
—at one time the top two “news magazines” in America—with an eye toward how they treat liberals and conservatives in the images and the captions. Ron Robinson, of Young America’s Foundation, has prepared a stunning PowerPoint slide show of the covers.
⁹⁷
Among the images, we find:

The list goes on, and until Barack Obama, no one got more favorable coverage than Bill Clinton, who, on various (usually smiling) covers, “explains himself,” was ready for “show time,” and was ready to “stand and deliver.” During his impeachment, however,
Time
presented the entire Lewinsky scandal as “a stinking mess” (September 28, 1998), without identifying
Clinton himself
as the cause of it. Covers proclaimed “Amnesty Makes Sense,” there is a “case for national service,” we are in a “Post-American World,” there is a “Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” and on no fewer than seven covers (eight, if you include Al Gore’s “Last Temptation”), “global warming” is real.
Time
dedicated two different covers to the “Haditha Massacre,” but never had a
single
cover admitting that no such “massacre” ever occurred and that it had libeled the U.S. Marines. Seven separate covers in one sense or another offered images and captions critical of the Iraq war.

Both Al Gore and his wife Tipper (“Team Gore”) were featured in flattering pictures in
Newsweek
in 1999 when Gore was the Democratic candidate. The following year
Newsweek
described Gore’s “Leap of Faith” while
Time
lauded Gore and his running mate, Joe Lieberman, for their “Chutzpah!” Four years later,
Time
called Democratic running mates John Kerry and John Edwards “The Contenders,” while
Newsweek
called them “The Sunshine Boys,” who “bet . . . on . . . the Politics of Optimism”—as if the Bush/Dick Cheney ticket was pessimistic. Edwards was later heralded as “The Sleeper.” Hillary Clinton was posed in a beaming head shot on
Time
(“Hillary: In Her Own Words”), and named by
Newsweek
as one of the “Women of the Year.” Later, she was posed in a serious, contemplative shot with “What Hillary Believes,” and yet again with
Newsweek
’s “I Found My Own Voice” cover, followed by
Newsweek
’s “Hear Her Roar.” By 2004, when she was a declared candidate,
Time
celebrated her as “The Fighter,” and she was still smiling when posed opposite Barack Obama with “The Race Is On.”

No one, not even Bill Clinton, came close to the adulatory coverage that Barack Obama received on the covers. In 2005, heralded as “A Rising Star,” a smiling Obama wanted to “get beyond Blue vs. Red,” when in fact he was the most radical candidate to run for president since George McGovern.
Time
chimed in with another complimentary cover, “The Next President,” followed by yet another fawning cover, “Black and White” by
Newsweek
. Between 2005 and 2009, Obama would appear on no fewer than forty-one
Time
/
Newsweek
covers, which likened him to FDR and Abraham Lincoln, explained how he would “Fix the World” and “talk us out of a depression,” proclaimed him part of the “New Global Elite” and, of course, “Person of the Year.” Again, these were the covers of
only
two of the more prominent magazines. Finally, the logical end point was reached with a
Newsweek
cover that heralded, “Obama on Obama,” almost a reformulation of “I AM THAT I AM.”

Over the same period of years, how did
Time
and
Newsweek
treat conservatives? Pat Buchanan was portrayed on one cover with an unsmiling, suspicious face and the caption, “Hell Raiser.” In 1996, a serious-looking Buchanan, hands clasped like a televangelist, was “Preaching Fear,” and
Newsweek
characterized him as a “Bully Boy.” A picture of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, mouth open and apparently angry, carried the caption “Mad as Hell.” On another occasion, a cartoonish version of Newt in an Uncle Sam suit depicted him as “Uncle Scrooge.” In a fight with Clinton over high spending, Gingrich and the Republicans shut down the government. Most of America cheered, but the newspapers and magazines labeled him “the Gingrich Who Stole Christmas.” Even when naming Newt “Man of the Year” in 1996,
Time
chose an unsmiling photo with an eerie green background. Robinson presented his findings to the editorial board at
Time
, and was told by the person who designed the cover that they had given the background a greenish tinge to “make Gingrich look more sinister.”
⁹⁸
In 1998, when Gingrich resigned as speaker after relentless attacks by the Democrats,
Newsweek
gleefully portrayed him as “The Loser,” while
Time
, depicting him on only half a cover as if he were sinking, intoned, “The Fall of Newt.”

Conservative talk show host and the voice of conservatism, Rush Limbaugh was portrayed as breathing fire into a microphone with a banner that read, “Voice of America?” He got another cover, “Rush’s World of Pain,” when he announced his addiction to OxyContin, accompanied by a tense-looking Rush apparently addressing a press conference. Probably the most famous Rush Limbaugh cover was
Time
’s 1995 depiction of a cigar-smoking Rush with Photoshopped smoke curling from his mouth and the caption, “Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?” The notion that
Time
,
Newsweek
, or any publication would run a headline, “Is Barack Obama Good for America?” was simply a nonstarter. Yet another Limbaugh cover featured Rush with a blackened “gag” across his mouth reading “ENOUGH,” and a supposed “conservative” making a “case against Limbaugh.”

Ronald Reagan drew moderately favorable covers, but
Time
still managed to show a photo of Reagan crying with the caption, “How the Right Went Wrong.” Of course, every one of
Time
’s solutions as to how the Right should correct itself involved moving further left . . . something that indeed would make Reagan cry! Other Republicans who received unflattering covers or captions questioning or challenging their relevance or competence included Chief Justice John Roberts, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove. Bush’s attorney general nominee, John Ashcroft, was presented as wanting a “Holy War,” with a second cover asking, “Should This Man Be Attorney General?” No such question, framed in such a way, was
ever
posed of
any
Democratic nominee, no matter how incompetent or dangerous. Quite the contrary, one of the worst attorney generals ever, Janet Reno, was benignly portrayed as “Reno: The Real Thing.” Oliver North, when he ran for the Senate in 1994, had his cover captioned “Down & Dirty.”

No one came in for more ridicule on the major magazine covers than President George W. Bush. He was portrayed as in a bubble (“Bush’s World: The Isolated President . . .”), out of his league in diplomacy (little feet under a giant cowboy hat), loved or hated (shown with a black eye on one side and a lipstick kiss on the other), part of the “Bush Dynasty,” “Bushwacked,” part of the “Avengers” with Dick Cheney, and “The Lone Ranger,” where once again
Time
claimed on its cover he was “increasingly isolated.” He was not only depicted, but indicted, in cover shots of the World Trade Center explosion with the headline, “What Bush Knew.” After Hurricane Katrina, amid claims by the left that the Iraq war and the cost of the hurricane would bust the budget, he was shown in New Orleans with the caption “No Big Easy.” In a commentary on his tax-cut/stimulus plan, he was shown as a goofy game-show host giving away tax dollars in a “$1.6 Trillion Gamble” (which, by the way, worked).

Meanwhile,
Time
and
Newsweek
also managed to run—sandwiched in between the half-dozen negative articles about Iraq, the two articles about the nonexistent “Haditha Massacre,” and a bevy of articles on Republican (but only Republican) scandals—at least
four
covers heralding a “new recession” when unemployment was a stunning 4.5 percent! Yet when Obama dramatically deepened the depression in 2009, the major magazine covers couldn’t find space for a single message critical of the president’s economic policies. Quite the contrary,
Newsweek
, showing a blue and red handshake, ran the headline “We Are All Socialists Now.” Suddenly, it was not the president who was responsible for the downturn, but the “rich.”
Time
(right under a small box called “Anger Management: Why Obama Is Keeping Cool”) explained “How Wall Street Sold Out America.”

John McCain, a media favorite so long as he criticized Republicans, found the adulatory press retreating from his side as soon as he decided to run against a Democrat, much less Barack Obama.
Newsweek
juxtaposed the blue Obama as “Mr. Cool” versus the red-faced McCain as “Mr. Hot,” playing on rumors that McCain could easily lose his temper. In a clever positioning on a cover called, “Does Temperament Matter?” (to which the answer was “yes” only if it was positive for Obama),
Time
placed Obama next to Lincoln, with McCain in the lower left, looking up at the two of them (for guidance, one supposes).

During the campaign of 2008, the media had a “slobbering love affair,” as Bernard Goldberg called it, with Obama. In his book of the same title, Goldberg asserted that it was not the “same old liberal bias we have witnessed for years. In 2008, the mainstream media crossed the line.”
⁹⁹
MSNBC, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, came close to nearly totally lopsided coverage, with 73 percent of its stories about John McCain assessed as negative, as opposed to only 14 percent of its stories about Obama being labeled negative.
¹⁰⁰
In a single ten-day period,
The New York Times
ran a stunning eleven news stories and three op-eds about Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, yet in the two months prior, the
Times
had only managed to run two stories examining Obama’s close relationship with former and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg said it all when he said journalists “preferred Obama. They liked Obama. They’re Democrats.”
¹⁰¹