This excerpt is from Eric Alterman's book, What Liberal Media? (Basic Books, 2003)

Given the success of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, New York Post, American Spectator, Weekly Standard, New York Sun, National Review, Commentary and so on, no sensible person can dispute the existence of a "conservative media." The reader might be surprised to learn that neither do I quarrel with the notion of a "liberal media." It is tiny and profoundly underfunded compared to its conservative counterpart, but it does exist. As a columnist for The Nation and an independent Weblogger for MSNBC.com, I work in the middle of it, and so do many of my friends. And guess what? It's filled with right-wingers. Unlike most of the publications named above, liberals, for some reason, feel compelled to include the views of the other guy on a regular basis in just the fashion that conservatives abhor.

Take a tour from a native: New York magazine, in the heart of liberal country, chose as its sole national correspondent the right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson. During the 1990s, The New Yorker -- the bible of sophisticated urban liberalism -- chose as its Washington correspondents the Clinton/Gore hater Michael Kelly and the soft, DLC neo-conservative Joe Klein. At least half of the "liberal New Republic" is actually a rabidly neoconservative magazine, and has been edited in recent years by the very same Michael Kelly, as well as the conservative liberal hater Andrew Sullivan. Its rival on the "left," The Nation, happily published the free-floating liberal hater Christopher Hitchens until he chose to resign, and also invites Alexander Cockburn to attack liberals with morbid predictability. The Atlantic Monthly -- a main stay of Boston liberalism -- even chose the apoplectic Kelly as its editor, who then proceeded to add a bunch of The Weekly Standard writers plus Christopher Hitchens to Atlantic's anti-liberal stable.

What is the hysterically funny but decidedly reactionary P. J. O'Rourke doing in both The Atlantic Monthly and the liberal Rolling Stone? Why does liberal Vanity Fair choose to publish a hagiographic Annie Liebowitz portfolio of Bush administration officials designed, apparently, to invoke notions of Greek and Roman gods? Why does the liberal New York Observer alternate National Review's Richard Brookheiser with the Joe McCarthy-admiring columnist, Nicholas von Hoffman -- both of whom appear alongside editorials that occasionally mimic the same positions taken downtown by the editors of The Wall Street Journal. On the Web, the tabloid-style liberal Web site Salon gives free reign to the McCarthyite impulses of both Andrew Sullivan and David Horowitz. The neoliberal Slate also regularly publishes both Sullivan and Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard and has even opened its pixels to such conservative evildoers as Charles Murray and Elliott Abrams. (The reader should know I am not objecting to the inclusion of conservatives in the genuinely liberal component of the media. In fact, I welcome them. I'd just like to see some reciprocity on the other side.)

Move over to the mainstream publications and broadcasts often labeled "liberal" and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal dominance becomes. The liberal New York Times op-ed page features the work of the unreconstructed Nixonite William Safire and for years accompanied him with the firebreathing -- if difficult to understand -- neocon A. M. Rosenthal. Current denizen Bill Keller also writes regularly from a soft, DLC neoconservative perspective. Why was then-editorial page editor, now executive editor, Howell Raines one of Bill Clinton's most vocal adversaries during his entire presidency? Why is this alleged bastion of liberalism, on the very morning I wrote these words, offering words of praise and encouragement to George W. Bush and John Ashcroft for invoking the hated Taft-Hartley legislation on behalf of shipping companies, following a lock-out of their West Coast workers? (Has The Wall Street Journal's editorial page ever, in its entire history, taken the side of American workers in a labor dispute?) It would later endorse for re-election the state's Republican governor, George Pataki, over his capable, if unexciting, liberal Democratic African-American opponent, Carl McCall.

The Washington Post's editorial page, which is considered less liberal than the Times but liberal nevertheless, is just swarming with conservatives, from Mr. Kelly to George Will to Robert Novak to Charles Krauthammer, among many more. On the morning before I finally let go of the draft manuscript of this book, the paper's lead editorial is endorsing the president's plan for a "preemptive" war against Iraq. The op-ed page was hardly less abashed in its hawkishness. A careful study by Michael Massing published in The Nation found, "Collectively, its editorials, columns and op-eds have served mainly to reinforce, amplify and promote the administration's case for regime change. And, as the house organ for America's political class, the paper has helped push the debate in the administration's favor.

If you wish to include CNN on your list of liberal media -- I don't, but many conservatives do -- then you had better find a way to explain the near ubiquitous presence of the attack dog Robert Novak, along with those of neocon virtuecrat William Bennett, National Review's Kate O'Beirne and Jonah Goldberg, The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, and Tucker Carlson. This is to say nothing of the fact that among CNN's most frequent guests are Ann Coulter and the anti-American telepreacher Pat Robertson. Care to include ABC News? Again, I don't but, if you wish, how do you deal with the fact that the only ideological commentator on its Sunday interview show is the hardline conservative George Will? Or how about the fact that its only explicitly ideological reporter is the deeply journalistically challenged conservative crusader John Stossel? How to explain the entire career of Cokie Roberts, who never met a liberal to whom she could not condescend? What about Time and Newsweek? In the former, we have Mr. Krauthammer holding forth and in the latter Mr. Will.

I could go on almost indefinitely here, but the point is clear. Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point here is that even the genuine liberal media is not so liberal. And it is no match
-- either in size, ferocity, or commitment for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

Eric Alterman has more information on his book available at WhatLiberalMedia.com.

To Buy the book What Liberal Media? [click here]

Reprinted from www.tompaine.com by permission.

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