MEDIA BASHING, LIBERAL–STYLE

Having thus dispatched the crux of the conservative critique, most mainstream press critics turn their scrutiny to the winds that whip the surface of their trade. The world of media has been transformed over the past generation, with the arrival of cable, CNN, talk radio, desktop publishing, C- SPAN, the Internet — any critic can recite the list in his sleep. The once- solid monopoly on national discourse held by the three networks and a handful of elite papers has broken down; and the gatekeepers of yesteryear have been left, so to speak, back at the gate. Media critics are concerned, deeply concerned, and none more so than Howard Kurtz, of the Washington Post. He has devoted an entire book to some of these changes, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time (Times Books, 384 pages, $ 25). “America,” he writes, “has become a talk-show nation, a boob-tube civilization, a run-at-the-mouth culture in which anyone can say anything at any time as long as they pull some ratings.”

This gives you an idea of the tone of Kurtz’s book, if not of most media criticism — although from his perch at the Post Kurtz has been influential in the field. Kurtz is a superior newspaper reporter, a Hoover vacuum for evocative detail and revealing quotes. His book is what reporters call a “notebook dump,” a reprocessing of his old stories padded out with the bits that got cut the first time around. (Some of these bits are delicious indeed: Oprah Winfrey, we learn, once ate a 12-pack of hotdog buns soaked in Log Cabin syrup.) But as an analyst of what the press does and why, he is no help at all. Hot Air is interesting primarily as an illustration — a textbook, really-of contemporary media criticism.

That criticism was brought into existence in reaction to a crisis: Newspaper readership is declining, the quality of TV news is declining, the length of network soundbites is declining, standards of analysis are declining. . . . Decline, decline, decline. “Change and decay is all around I see,” Mr. Dooley lamented when the Hungarians moved into the old neighborhood, and media critics share his Irish gloom. Ours, Kurtz writes, is “a culture sinking into the gutter.” And the lead weights pulling us ever downward are known to all: “Violence-soaked movies, sex-saturated sitcorns, the more virulent strains of rap music, [and] trash talk.”

Mainstream media critics inevitably mutate into moralists — it’s one of the hazards of the job — but whether as critic or moralist, Kurtz fails in his first task, which is to make distinctions. “Trash talk” is the subject of his book — that, and the destructive effects of too much talk on the mainstream press. Under that wide umbrella he crowds in Rush Limbaugh, Ted Koppel, conspiracy cranks on the Internet, Larry King, the McLaughlin Group and the Capital Gang, Geraldo Rivera and the omnivorous Oprah, Don Imus and Roger Ailes and Michael Kinsley. There are heroes among them — Koppel, of course, and King and Kinsley, with reservations — but the rest represent for Kurtz an unrelieved tableau of vulgarity. He can elide from the relatively sober Limbaugh to the querulous quintet on McLaughlin to the mildly kooky G. Gordon Liddy to the wacko “Mark from Michigan,” in hopes of rendering them collectively as a single perilous phenomenon f Talk.

And to underscore the peril it poses to the mainstream press, he must postulate like all mythologists an Eden of long ago, a Golden Age when Americans got their news straight. There’s a strong strain of nostalgia in mainstream press criticism. It’s diffcult to know when or where this ancien regime of uncorrupted journalism actually existed. In the yellow journalism of the Hearst papers? In the White House press room under JFK or FDR? In the post-Watergate Washington Post? Perhaps in the days when Edward R. Murrow was interviewing Jayne Mansfield, and Walter Cronkite was co-hosting a kiddie show with a make-believe cow? Kurtz doesn’t try to tell us; the fallen state of American journal- ism is simply assumed. Suddenly, he writes, “viewers and listeners now [have] to be on guard, to decipher and decode the mixed messages from this rapidly changing media culture.”

The date of the Fall can be traced with some precision, and it seems roughly to correspond to the rise of right-wingers on the chat shows. (Conservatives should go ahead and admit that the right dominates the “talk culture,” from Limbaugh to the Capital Gang. The most notable exception, on CNN, is Reliable Sources, where a panel of “mainstream” reporters lament the decline of journalism, week after week. Kurtz is a regular panelist.) And he knows why consevatives are so successful on radio and TV: Liberalism is just too complex for the soundbite-crazed electronic media.

“Subtle arguments,” he writes, referring in this instance to the liberal position on affrmative action, “were lost amid the shouting at CNN.” Conservatives like Pat Buchanan and George Will were comfortable with lack of nuance. But the unhappy chumps hired to shout them down, like Kinsley, Tom Braden, and Sam Donaldson, found it diffcult. Ben Bradlee failed on an early tryout for This Week with David Brinkley because he’s “not a knee-jerk liberal.” Kinsley, for his part, “could not function on television as a Clinton “surrogate’,” which will come as a surprise to most Crossfire viewers, as well as to George Stephanopoulos, who offered Kinsley a job as a Clinton speechwriter.

It is probably coincidence that in Hot Air the subtle thinkers, the guys too good for TV, happen to be liberals, or rather liberals who decline to be identified as such. Mainstream critics have determined, as we’ve seen, that liberal bias isn’t a problem. This is also why Kurtz can let drop a truly “horrendous” datum — that in network news coverage before the 1994 election, 100 percent of the comments about Newt Gingrich were negative — and then return without further comment to pummeling Rush Limbaugh for complaining about media bias. For Kurtz and his colleagues, the media’s problems are far more complex. Are soundbites corrupting democracy? Does the accelerated news cycle hurt long-range government planning? And the big one: Is money — particularly lush speaking fees — corrupting journalism?

Fallows, too, wants to follow the money — indeed, both he and Kurtz seem to be using the same money-chasing clips. They cite the work of James Warren, sometime media critic for the Chicago Tribune, who has broken several stories that turn the stomach of every media critic. In the fall of 1994, for example, NBC’s Tim Russeft received $ 20,000 to interview Robert Rubin and Bob Dole in an appearance before the American Bankers Association. Similarly, the critics report, Cokie Roberts and her husband Steven V. of U. S. News & World Report planned to accept a ludicrously large speaking fee from the criminals at Philip Morris. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such stories, and the horror they evoke from Fallows and Kurtz seems genuine enough.

Yet it’s diffcult to grasp the essence of their com-plaint. “The more time you spend with lobbyists and corporate offcials,” Kurtz writes, “the more you come to identify with their world view.” Paid speaking engagements, says Fallows, “reinforce the idea that journalists are really just performers, who put on a show for a price.”

There’s a certain rough justice in all this indignation, as incoherent or implausible as it may be. The revolution is once again eating its children. For 20 years the baby-boomer press has discharged a kind of free-floating moralism into public life, most of it poorly thought out, and now it has entangled the boomer press itself. The sanctimony can pop out anywhere, anytime, from anyone. Tom Brokaw, who is paid $ 2 million a year to read other people’s words from a teleprompter, refuses those big speaking fees: “I call it white-collar crime.” And Steve Roberts weighs in on the talk shows: ” I’ve been asked to do McLaughlin, and I won’t do it.”

Now that’s news: Steve Roberts turned down a chance to be on TV! Silly as it is, the highmindedness has a serious object: Media critics want to root out the source of the public’s alienation with the press. But they should probably look elsewhere. Not many people who dislike the press worry that liberal reports like Cokie Roberts are being bought by the tobacco companies. And surely no one is disgusted to learn that Tim Russerr, or any other journalist who appears on TV, does his work “for a price.”

But for Fallows, “price” is the problem. He quotes ABC’s Jim Wooten: ” Journalism, or reporting, whatever you want to call it, is diminished by the quest for money. . . . Reporters should not do things mainly for money.” (Wooten makes several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.) The mainstream critics believe the press should remain always beyond the vulgar tug of commerce; that it has been debased, not by bias or ideological conformity, but by the allurements of the world.

This view is part of a larger self-image with which journalism flatters itself: the press-as-clerisy, a sanctified class that raises its gaze to the greater good while everyone else pursues meaner interests. The arrogance implicit here is far closer to the real source of the public disenchantment that troubles our media critics. Fallows hints at it himself, taking gentle swipes at such princes of the press as Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings for being out of touch with the plebes.

How then to regain the public’s affection? Breaking the News closes with a call for “public journalism,” a nonce enthusiasm of many media critics. Public journalism is “cooperative, collaborative.” It goes beyond the whipsaw of daily news reporting to place events in context. It is saturated in conscience. “Journalism,” says Fallows, “could not survive if “public life is not going well.'” Reporters must therefore ensure that public life is going well. Under sway of public journalism, newspapers have undertaken some remarkable experiments. They’ve held citizen “summits” and convened mock legislatures for their readers. They’ve reported on “solutions” as well as problems and asked politicians the questions their readers wanted to ask. At the New Orleans Times Picayune, “black and white reporters . . . tried for a while to exchange lives with each other, putting themselves as much as possible into the other’s racial position and seeing their community through the other’s eyes.” Public journalism is growth therapy: not only for Democracy but for reporters too.

The august David Broder of the Washington Post is one of its patron saints. In 1990 he wrote: “It is time for us in the world’s freest press to become activists . . . on behalf of the process of self-government,” It’s worth noting that public journalism was conceived shortly after the debacle of 1988, when, as most reporters know, the Republicans won a third straight presidency by illegitimate means: first the Reagan hypnosis, then the visage of Willie Horton. In their vanity, many members of the press blamed themselves for George Bush’s ascension — and for the soundbite ethic, the negative advertising, the superficial reporting that allowed such supposed cynicism to succeed. As a consequence they have undertaken to raise the consciousness of their customers.

Fallows pretends that the techniques of public journalism are resisted by the “press establishment.” This is a dodge, as he inadvertently concedes: ” Although Washington Post editor] Leonard Downie objects vehemently to public journalism in theory, he has said that he respects most of the actual journalistic projects that have been done in its name.” Downie’s view is unambiguous: “These are not new ways of reporting.” And he’s right. The cure is simply another form of the disease, as reformers reform their earlier reforms. After all, much of what Fallows derides in political coverage — its fascination with “inside baseball,” for example — was itself a reform of an earlier style of reporting, in which journalists merely told readers what politicians were saying. That reportage came to be considered the work of a public-relations patsy — it would be far better to give readers “context,” background, the inside scoop. In the end, public journalism will prove to be equally unsatisfying. Reform follows reform, and still the public turns off Dan Rather and flips on Rush Limbaugh.

Under either “public” or “traditional” journalism, the press’s view of itself as a clerisy, as an agent of uplift, remains unchanged. Yet with the exfoliation of “non-traditional” sources of information, the pose grows ever harder to hold; technology has exploded the conceit. Cleric-critics like Fallows and Kurtz cast their eye over the new regime of radio gas-bags,TV shoutathons, and Internet yahoos, and like a Park Avenue matron finding a gang of stevedores in the front parlor, they ask: “Who are all these people?” There’s a kind of poignancy to the worry, something touching in the cluelessness. For all its aimless moral- izing, its chin-wagging and brow- knitting, mainstream media criticism may be nothing more than the death rattle of an old order passing away.

By Andrew Ferguson