Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  With coverage of the scandal reaching “saturation levels . . . on the front page and on the evening news day after day,” Nixon’s popularity finally fell.72 As Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “It wasn’t journalism; it was lynching. Not only were the pretentious canons of the trade chucked overboard; so were fairness and common sense.”73 Moreover, the journalists never came close to investigating the key allegation, namely whether the order for the break-in actually came from Nixon, or, as G. Gordon Liddy has argued, from Nixon’s White House counsel, John Dean.74

  Nixon never forgot, or forgave, his treatment by the press. In 1989, when advising the newly elected president, George H. W. Bush, Nixon warned him that reporters were “inherently adversarial”:TV reporters always claim to be “speaking for the people,” but they are really speaking primarily for themselves. In many ways, they are political actors, just like the President, mindful of their ratings, careful of preserving and building. A President must respect them for that power, but he can never entirely trust them.75

  Ripping the façade off objective journalism, Nixon told Bush, through a “memo” published in TV Guide, that the “media don’t have to be convinced. They have to be outfoxed, outflanked and outperformed . . . [and] will use his failures to pursue [their own agendas].”76

  If reporters expected applause for their destruction of Nixon, they were in for a surprise (although they certainly applauded each other). By 1966, the media was already held in low regard, with a 29 percent approval rating, falling still further to 18 percent by 1971. A slightly different survey about press “leaders” in ten institutions showed that they had indeed gained a little ground in public levels of confidence, but by 1980 their “respect levels” had plummeted to 16 percent.77 A similar Gallup poll revealed that journalists and reporters ranked below pollsters and funeral directors as having honest and ethical standards, although reporters came in ahead of lawyers and insurance salesmen! Yet it was hardly a joking matter: overall, the composite surveys used by Harris to examine overall institutional leadership showed a complete collapse of public confidence after the Kennedy assassination.78

  Journalists’ assault on Nixon had come at a great cost—the integrity of journalism itself. Rather than reestablishing its credibility, the mainstream press had lost the trust of the public. In the process, journalism fought back by attacking the public itself and moving further left. In a 2001 study of business and media elites, nine out of ten business leaders said that “people can be trusted,” while only seven of ten of the top editors, reporters, and publishers in the study thought people were trustworthy.79

  Peter Brown, an editor at the Orlando Sentinel, conducted a survey in which he sent a professional pollster to reporters in five midsize U.S. cities, as well as the large metro area of Dallas-Fort Worth. Brown and pollster Bill Hamilton devised two separate surveys. One polled 500 residents and 478 journalists in five cities: Dayton, Ohio; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Syracuse, New York; Roanoke, Virginia; and Chico/Redding, California; while the other survey used a massive (by polling standards) database of 3,400 home addresses of journalists in thirteen news organizations—including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Washington Post, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, and many other large- to midsize city papers. In the first survey, the pollster phoned residents in those areas at random and asked the same questions posed to the reporters.

  They found that journalists were more likely “to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedes and trade stocks, and less likely to go to church, do volunteer work or put down roots in a community.”80 Taken together, the profile revealed a class of people far removed from the lifestyles of “average” Americans. Journalists were “twice as likely as others to rent foreign movies, drink Chablis, own an espresso maker and read magazines such as Architectural Digest and Food & Wine.”81 They did not have many children, lived in expensive urban neighborhoods, avoided rural areas, bowling, auto races, yard sales, coupons, or pickups. With this patchwork of shared elite values, “advocacy of elite interests comes so easily that it scarcely seems like bias at all,” said one media observer.82

  Michael Kelly, the late writer and editor for The Atlantic and other publications, confirmed the cultural uniformity of journalists, especially those in Washington:They are parts of a product-based cultural whole, just like the citizens of Beverly Hills. . . . They go to the same parties, send their children to the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods. They interview each other, argue with each other, sleep with each other, marry each other, live and die by each other’s judgment. . . . Not surprisingly, they tend to believe the same things at the same time. . . . They believe that nothing a politician does in public can be taken at face value, but that everything he does is a metaphor for something he is hiding. . . . Above all, they believe in the power of what they have created, in the subjectivity of reality and the reality of perceptions, in image.83

  Joel Kotkin and David Friedman, two researchers who specialize in studying high-tech businesses, said “the news media have come to resemble a modern-day caste, largely dominated by a relative handful of individuals sharing a common background and, in most cases, common real estate.”84 Despite hiring more minorities and women, “in their class and education . . . the media have become ever more rarified.”85 Journalists appeared to prove Bernard Goldberg’s assertions that there was, indeed, leftward media bias: a 1981 Brookings survey of journalists found that 51 percent said the Washington press corps had a political bias, and 96 percent of them perceived it as a liberal bias.86

  Journalists are paid substantially more than the average American (42 percent of journalists earn $50,000 or more, compared to 18 percent of the general public); are almost twice as likely to support abortion (82 percent to 49 percent, according to a separate Los Angeles Times survey); and are far less likely to support prayer in schools or attend church. Most important, while the media elites live more like the rich than they did “average Americans,” they held a deep-seated hostility to capitalism and conservatism. A subsequent study by Indiana University scholars found that median income among journalists has continued to increase, rising nearly 40 percent since 1992.87

  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:• Liberal actor Paul Newman celebrated in 1994 as “One of a Kind” with a very flattering photo when he turned seventy years old.

  • Liberal CNN founder Ted Turner celebrated in 1997 for his $1 billion gift to the UN.

  • Liberal actor Christopher Reeve celebrated for his “heroic battle to rebuild his life” with a photo captioned “Super Man.”

  • Democrat ex-governor from Vermont Howard Dean, well known for his angry rants, depicted in August 2003 as a smiling, “feisty . . . renegade.”

  • Liberal musician Bruce Springsteen depicted in 2002 as “Reborn in the USA” with a flattering picture.

  • Liberal singing group Dixie Chicks portrayed as the “Radical Chicks,” who were victims of a right-wing assault to label them “unpatriotic.”

  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).