If there were a "Media" forum ...

FEAR AND FAVOR
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?
Issue of 2005-02-14 and 21
Posted 2005-02-07

Just before last fall's Presidential election, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, and Philip Taubman, the paper's Washington bureau chief, went on the road to inspect the candidates' campaigns. In Florida, on October 22nd, they arranged to have drinks with Karl Rove, the White House's chief political strategist, and Dan Bartlett, its head of communications. It was supposed to be a friendly get-together, and that's how it went for the first few minutes, until Keller asked Rove what he thought of the Times' coverage. It's the sort of question that editors often ask important people, in the same spirit that a politician asks, "How'm I doing?," usually hoping for an answer somewhere in the lower-middle range of politeness and candor. But Rove, Keller told me not long ago, "pounded on us for two cocktails' worth of conversation." Saying what? "It was three kinds of things," Keller explained. "It was Bush accomplishments we had ignored, flaws in the Kerry record that we had put inside the paper, and a number of pieces we had done looking hard at the Bush record. In their view, that all amounted to arming the Kerry campaign."

Keller and I were talking in his office in the Times newsroom at nine one morning, a moment when most newspaper offices are empty and expectantly quiet, like a theatre a couple of hours before the curtain. Keller took his time describing the conversation, to suggest that he wasn't dismissing the criticisms out of hand. "Your initial reaction, especially in someone as ferocious as Rove, is to drop into a defensive crouch," he said. "But I try not to do that. I listened, with a fair measure of skepticism, because a lot of it is calculated. But there was some genuineness to it. He went through a long litany of complaints. I do think he was channelling a feeling about the New York Times that's out there in the land, that we should be concerned about, or at least aware of."

After cautioning me not to treat conservatism as monolithic, Bill Keller wrote, "I think conservatives feel this way in part because for years they've been told they should feel this way. In a more concerted way than liberal critics, conservative critics have castigated major newspapers, especially ours, and network news broadcasts. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the pundit choir at Fox News, right-wing columnists and talk-radio hosts, conservative authors, the scholars and opinion-mongers of Heritage and Hoover, and a fair number of conservative officeholders have made it a mantra?-?'the liberal press.' I'm far from being a conspiracy theorist, but I think this has been deliberate and I think it has some effect, especially on people who don't actually read the New York Times." He went on, "Some of this is played up for commercial or political effect. Ailes and Murdoch"?-Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, its owner?-"have found and exploited a slice of America that feels left out, and part of their marketing effort entails bashing us. Fox's claim to be ?'fair and balanced'?-the most ingeniously cynical slogan in the history of media marketing?-is premised on the notion that ?'those other guys have a liberal agenda.'"

However, Keller, who is himself of indeterminate politics but is probably more conservative than his fiery populist predecessor, Howell Raines, went on, "Conservatives feel estranged because they feel excluded. They do not always see themselves portrayed in the mainstream press as three-dimensional humans, and they don't see their ideas taken seriously or treated respectfully. This is something I've long felt we should correct, not to pander to red-state readers but because it's bad journalism to caricature anyone with reductionist portraits and crude shorthand. . . . Portraying conservatives fairly does not mean equal time for creationism. But it does mean, for example, writing about abortion in a way that does justice to the deep moral qualms most Americans have about it. It means trying to understand the thinking of people who regard gay marriage as unacceptable, who worry that gun controls represent an encroachment on their civil liberties."

A better understanding of conservatives seems manageable, but there is another possibility, which is much more worrisome, at least to journalists who work in the mainstream media. It is that during the years of heavy shelling?-through impeachment and the Florida recount and then the rough 2004 campaign?-what they consider their compact with the public has been seriously damaged. Journalism that is inquisitive and intellectually honest, that surprises and unsettles, didn't always exist. There is no law saying that it must exist forever, and there are political and business interests that would be better off if it didn't exist and that have worked hard to undermine it. This is what journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry about: what if people don't believe in us, don't want us, anymore?