Average 2

In the Trump era, one almost looks back fondly at the days when people like Nicholas Kristof and Rush Limbaugh were beating the Iraq war drum together. Those were the days! At least we all agreed on something once, even if it was a murderous, unforgivable mistake.  

Such cuddly rhetorical cooperation between left and right seems impossible now, when the two camps of our ongoing cultural war don’t seem to intersect at all. 

Except they do. From bombing Syria (remember Van Jones declaring that Trump “became president in that moment”?) to rolling back the already-weak Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill, there are still huge areas of political overlap between even Trump Republicans and “mainstream” Democrats. 

A classic example of how we in the press commoditize division – even in clear and important areas of bipartisan cooperation – involved the passage of this year’s $716 billion military appropriations bill. 

It was a huge bill. The year one increase in Trump’s defense budget that passed with overwhelming Democratic cooperation – 85-10 in the Senate – was $82 billion, higher than the Iraq war appropriations for either 2003 or 2004. The two-year increase. 

The two-year increase of $165 billion eclipsed the peak of annual Iraq war spending and is also higher than the entire military budget for either China or Russia.

Yet what was the story about the defense bill? “Trump signs defense bill, but snubs the Senator the legislation is named after – John McCain,” was the Washington Post headline. 

This was before McCain’s death. The Post assigned three reporters to this story – three! – and ripped Trump for having “name-checked” four other members of congress, but not McCain – whom Trump, they wrote, “frequently disparages.” They quoted a mortified John Kerry, who seethed: “Disgraceful.”

This story was picked up by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC, The Hill, CNN, CBS, the AP and others. Cindy McCain even tweeted about it. 

To recap: Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the Senator whose name was attached to the legislation.

This is the trick. The schism is the conventional wisdom. Making the culture war the center of everyone’s universe is job one. 

A better way to think about it is that there are two sets of conventional wisdom: one for one “side,” one for the other. Think about media iniquity in pairs. For every hack on one side, there’s an opposite hack on the other side. One may be worse than the other, but their mirroring takes on big issues cumulatively to create a consistent message. 

Take, for instance, the Why Do They Hate Us? question, about why the public mistrusts the press.

The highest priest of the “Liberal Bias” question is Emmy-winning former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg crafted the modern conservative take on liberal media, beginning with a 1996 editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Networks Need a Reality Check.” Most of the modern tenets of the liberal-bias religion are found in that early editorial, which he elucidated at greater length with a subsequent smash-smash-hit #1 bestselling book, Bias. 

If one could surgically remove its obnoxious thesis, and re-cast it as a lurid tell-all about egomaniacal network TV personalities, Bias would actually be a funny book. With a few tweaks, you could re-write it as The Unbearable Full-of-Shitness of Dan Ratherand you’d have the raw material for a great comic movie, or a long-running series in the Larry Sanders vein.

Unfortunately, he went another way. The basic plot of Bias is that Goldberg, who says he voted for McGovern twice and never voted Republican in his life, began over the years to be troubled by the liberal slant of his own CBS network. 

His Road to Damascus moment supposedly came when a Florida neighbor – a “good ol’ boy” building contractor named Jerry Kelley who sounds like an early prototype for Joe the Plumber – called Goldberg to complain about a CBS story.

Kelley had watched a Dan Rather/CBS “Reality Check” piece about presidential candidate Steve Forbes and his flat tax proposal. The story, done by reporter Eric Enberg, had quoted three experts who basically thought the flat tax was stupid. 

Enberg himself used words like “wacky” to describe the idea, and closed by quoting an unnamed economist who suggested we test the idea “in Albania.” With a smirk, he added: “Eric Enberg, CBS News, Washington.”

Seeing this piece, Kelley calls Goldberg to complain, and says, “You got too many snippy wise guys doin’ the news.” Goldberg actually wrote doin’, underscoring the regular-guy-ness of Kelley, who Goldberg said had “saved my family” by rebuilding Goldberg’s house after Hurricane Andrew.

Goldberg probably didn’t know it, or maybe he did, but he was doing the very thing he would later accuse “liberal media” of doing, i.e. cartoonizing the little guy. Biasfurthered the cliché of the hard-working, salt-of-the-earth “silent majority” American fella (it’s always a fella) who gets ridiculed by the cruel snobbishness of upper-class media jerks. 

Goldberg, a lifelong TV producer who’d been in the business since 1972 and knew the mechanics of journalism inside and out, was right that the “Reality Check” piece was a hatchet job, and that Enberg was plainly making fun of his subject.

But Enberg wasn’t making fun of little guys like Jerry Kelley. He was making fun of congenital billionaire Steve Forbes, one of the world’s biggest assholes, a lecturing nasal weirdo whose face is frozen in a creepy pinched-cheek smile, as if even the inside of his mouth were stuffed with dollars.

In the pre-Trump era, Forbes would have led every Top Talentless Rich Douchebags With the Temerity to Run For President listicle. His flat tax proposal was a transparent ploy to make the Jerry Kelleys of the world pay proportionally more tax, and the Steve Forbeses pay less.

Goldberg left this part out. That it’s the only important part of the story is unfortunate, because he got everything else right.

Goldberg captures the fact that the news business is full of pompous jackasses. When Goldberg told his co-worker/boss Rather that he was going to write a Wall Street Journal editorial accusing the business of being slanted in a liberal direction, Rather exploded. “I’m getting viscerally angry about this,” he said, and proceeded to remind Goldberg that as a young man, he had enlisted in the Marines not once, but twice! 

Goldberg went on to recount an episode when the Murrah building was blown up in Oklahoma City while Rather was on vacation. Anchor Dan was summoned back to work, but in the meantime, someone had to do the news, and that someone happened to be Connie Chung.

While 168 bodies were still sizzling, Rather showed up at CBS and was “so incensed that Connie was on air first” that he spent hours calling media buddies and ranting off the record about what a second-rate journalist Chung was.

This is all basically Genesis 1:1 of the “liberal bias” religion. Goldberg tells a true story about the upper ranks of network news being full of people who run editorials disguised as news more or less constantly, and are, like Rather, often so far up their own asses that they’ll start screaming their regular-person credentials at you at the slightest hint of criticism.

This story casts Dan Rather as the obnoxious “elite” and makes humble contractor Jerry “Doin’ the News” Kelley the working-class victim. But it’s all in service of selling the politics of the ultimate aristocrat, Steve Forbes, a man who probably didn’t blow his own nose until he was at least thirty. In that one unholy trinity you have the outlines of modern conservatism’s whole argument, which casts the press and Hollywood as “elites,” while their corporate overlords are kept off-camera.

The “liberal media” argument Bernard Goldberg founded almost always focuses on the individual political leanings of people high up in media organizations. The numbers there are actually pretty hard to ignore. Even the Washington Post recently ran statsshowing that only 7% of reporters currently identify as Republicans.

Goldberg, whose path to journalism was similar to my father’s – he went to Rutgers in the sixties – regularly comments on the upper-crust schools his colleagues favor. Whenever he dumps on someone in the business, like onetime CBS executive Vice President Jon Klein, he’ll mention if he can that Klein is “an Ivy Leaguer, he went to Brown.”

It’s regularly part of his quips about political hypocrisy. “They love affirmative action schools, as long as their own kids get into Ivy League schools,” he snaps.

The news business is absolutely different in a class sense than it once was, particularly at the national level. It’s almost exclusively a job held by graduates of expensive colleges, when this was once a job for working-class types who started as paper-kids or printers. And being graduates of universities, most people in the business start with a pretty uniform political worldview, at least from a partisan standpoint. 

Conservapedia cites this stat, culled from a George Washington University study: “The ratio of Yale faculty donations in the 2004 presidential election between Kerry and Bush was 150:3. The ratio at Princeton was 114:1, and at Harvard, 406:13.”

That sounds about right. One can stipulate that Goldberg is correct that the national press is a cultural and political bubble in this sense, and has been for a while.

The story he tells about New York Times film critic Pauline Kael disbelieving that McGovern could lose to Nixon because “I don’t know a single person who voted for him!” might as well have been about Trump, because the same dynamic is still true. 

What he leaves out is that all these college-educated Democrats work for giant bloodless corporations who dictate coverage on a much broader level that actually drifts to the extreme in a different direction.

Goldberg hyper-focuses on how culture-war issues are treated in the hands of the Rathers of the world, and even that he gets wrong. Take this sentence, for instance, about the New York Times and its invidious failure to write about his first “liberal bias” editorial:

The world’s most important newspaper, which would make room on page one for a story about the economy of Upper Volta or about the election of a lesbian dogcatcher in Azerbaijan or about affirmative action in Fiji, didn’t think a story about media bias, leveled by a network news correspondent, was worth even a few paragraphs.

Yeah, actually, Bernard, we basically don’t cover Africa at all. Also, Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso about fifteen years before you wrote Bias. I’m not sure exactly where it is today, but by 2007, the only American news network to have a bureau in Africa was ABC. So that’s one TV office for a few billion people. 

Studies consistently show (and everyone in the business knows this) that you need to kill third-worlders in massive numbers to earn anything like the coverage we’d devote to one dead American, particularly an upper-class American. 

One of the ugliest stats ever recorded about the press in this country that almost, but not quite, validates Goldberg’s thesis involves CNN coverage of Congo between 2004 and 2008. At the time, about 50,000 Congolese a month were dying from war, genocide, and associated problems like disease. It’s one of the major humanitarian disasters of the last 100 years, rivaling World War II for deaths.

But of the 44 segments on Anderson Cooper 360 done during that four year period, only 16 did not involve either Angelina Jolie or the plight of gorillas. 

Forget about lesbians in third-world counties – we don’t cover people in third world countries.

Goldberg consistently tells his audiences that “liberal bias” is the big uncovered story. It is, he says, “the one topic that had pretty much been out of bounds on network news.”

You can’t smoke enough crack to make that sentence remotely true. Liberal bias is the “one topic” network news doesn’t cover? We don’t cover anything! There are at least a dozen massive stories that the national press ignores on basically a daily basis.

We don’t cover child labor, debt slavery, human rights atrocities (particularly by U.S. client nations), white-collar crime, environmental crises involving nuclear or agricultural waste, military contracting corruption (the Pentagon by now cannot account for over six trillion dollars in spending), corporate tax evasion and dozens of other topics.

How about process stories? Does the average American know how the World Bank operates? Have audiences ever heard of terms like “structural adjustment?” Who out there knows what the Overseas Private Investment Corporation is? How central banks work? How a bill gets passed through congress? How and where military forces are deployed?

Does the average American know what section 127e of the federal code is, how it’s been used to give legal authority to military operations not only not approved by Congress, but unknown to Congress? Does that same viewer know we have special forces deployed in 149 nations right now (that’s 75% of the world, and the number has expanded in the Trump years)? That we have ongoing combat operations in eight nations right now? 

These sweeping coverage decisions reflect the real biases of news companies. The so-called liberals at the infantry level of the business staffing the foxholes of day-to-day news broadcasts are rarely concerned with the important stories we’re not asked to cover, which are usually institutional and complex in nature.

Goldberg’s “liberal bias” schtick was a significant development on the road to Trump. He took an ugly truth about the demographics of the news business and used it to make an argument that “the elites” are journalists, not their bosses or their advertisers.

Trump took this truth and ran with it on the trail in 2016. It’s been at the core of his rhetoric ever since.

Ironically, Goldberg – far too late – tried to argue to Bill O’Reilly a few years ago that while “liberal media” may be a thing, Fox isn’t better. (It’s actually about a hundred times worse, but give Goldberg credit for trying). “Liberal news organizations are going to play down liberal screw-ups,” he said, “but Fox News is gonna play down conservative screw-ups.”

Naturally, O’Reilly balked at this simple observation, leading to the following exchange:

GOLDBERG: So Fox isn’t the conservative network, is that what you’re trying to tell us?

O’REILLY: I never bought that, that Fox is the conservative network… I buy that Fox gives traditional conservatives a voice that they don’t have on the other network.

Bill O’Reilly being unable to even cop to Fox being a “conservative network” says pretty much everything you need to know about how deep the derangement is over there.  

The flip side of the Bias con – why it works, despite its pretty transparent stupidity – is that most working journalists are too self-serious to admit the true part of it. We constantly validate right-wing caricatures of us as humorless upper-class snobs.  

Here’s the argument espoused by most working reporters on the Why Do They Hate Us? debate:

1. Most of the distrust of the media is found among conservatives. Statistician/poll guru Nate Silver, a onetime baseball stats nerd who has somehow become the High Mullah of All Things since he began writing about politics, summed it upin simple terms. “Republicans hate the media a lot, and Democrats hate the media a little.”
2. Those discontented Republican voters, the thinking goes, are really upset because they just can’t deal with reality. This is because, as comedian Stephen Colbert and enlightened press figures like Paul Krugman of the New York Timesalike have been quick to point out, reality has “a well-known liberal bias.”
3. Therefore, ordinary people don’t really hate us. They just hate reality. 

This is a version of a depressingly common journalistic trope: “People just suck.” It’s the line we reach for when we run out of real explanations for things.

They hate us for our freedom, the George W. Bush-ism that went mostly unchallenged for years as an explanation for Islamic hostility to America’s Middle Eastern ambitions, is a classic example of the genre. Various versions of the same explanation (spinoffs of the “deplorable” theory) have become go-to explanations for the Trump phenomenon. 

But we see this answer most often applied to the question of our own unpopularity. Since Goldberg first went public and moreso since Trump’s election, there have been repeat expeditions into flyover country, in search of the elusive source of the liberal bias religion.

Take Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, who in late 2017 decided to tackle the issue. Sullivan was tired of the despicable abuse she was getting from MAGA-type readers,* and decided to answer an angry, Trump-supporting letter-writer named Daniel Hastings.

Hastings challenged Sullivan to leave her DC/LA/New York media bubble and “Take a visit to the heart of the country. Go to a diner or a flea market. Strike up some conversations. Come back and report without malice or deceit…”

Sullivan was offended at first. After all, she said, she’d already indulged such complaints. “I turned down invitations to speak in Istanbul, Moscow and even Paris in 2017, and instead visited Arizona, Alabama, Wisconsin, Indiana and small-town Pennsylvania,” she wrote.

Peeved that this great sacrifice wasn’t enough for the likes of Hastings – I already skipped a trip to Paris! – Sullivan finally took her reader up on his dare. She ended up choosing Angola, New York (a characteristically undesirable/nowhere-ish hole between Erie and Buffalo) as a “heart of the country” locale.

There, she did just as Hastings suggested, hanging in “diners, flea markets, and pizza joints” for six whole weeks, in an effort to take the pulse of the commoner.

The awesome humor of a national news reporter needing to organize such an anthropological expedition to her own country to prove a connection to “real” people was clearly lost on Sullivan, but she at least tried. She came back with a number of conclusions.

She did concede the snarky, superior tone of reporters on social media probably grated. But the bulk of her conclusions pointed the finger back at her audience.

Here, she sketched out a particularly bad example she met named Jason Carr, who sounded like a caricature from a Mike Judge movie:

Much worse was my conversation with Jason Carr of Green Bay, Wis., a middle-aged member of the Oneida Nation who was visiting his girlfriend in western New York. Wearing a “Born to Chill” T-shirt and sitting behind the wheel of his Ford F-150 pickup truck in a KeyBank parking lot, Carr told me that media reports strike him as nothing but “a puppet show” that is “filtered and censored” by big business.

He buys into the conspiracy theories that the United States government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the 2012 massacre of Connecticut schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged…

I left the conversation shaking my head, knowing that, as is clear from the huge following of sites like the conspiracy-promoting Infowars, [Carr is] far from alone in his beliefs.

Sullivan tried to be generous in her assessment. Carr, she wrote, “was the exception, not the rule.” Moreover, she added, “His complaints didn’t worry me as much as something else I encountered again and again: indifference…”

This led to her core conclusion:

So many people were happy to complain vaguely about “the media,” without really caring about the news, or following it with much interest. The concept of being a responsibly informed citizen? That was all too rare.

People just don’t care, she realized. Readers just won’t do the work to be educated. They’re too lazy to break out of the ignorance cycle: just irresponsible, bad citizens.

This is the reporting version of They Hate Us for Our Freedom. It’s also standard within the industry, and really just an unfunny version of the classic Mel Brooks joke: 

Your excellency, the peasants are revolting!

You said it, they stink on ice!

Trump’s election unleashed a barrage of Sullivan-style investigations. One development was that a less overtly nasty version of The Peasants Are Revolting called “media illiteracy” began to be bandied about in academic and press-crit circles. Under this theory, hatred of the media arose out of the “confusion” of the digital age, in which people (read: dumb conservatives) had a hard time determining the validity of sources. 

Part of the “media illiteracy” concept involves the idea that Fox is a giant evil misinformation platform designed to mislead uneducated people, which of course it is. But we regularly run that story like it’s a surprise.

What Washington Post reader doesn’t know this? Yet it’s covered relentlessly. It’s gotten to the point where the Post even does stories about how Fox broadcasts the statements of the President of the United States without correcting him. 

Why the fuck would they correct him? They’re not in the news business. They’re in the sell-ads-to-aging-anger-junkies business. The only reason not to point this out is that it might make audiences wonder about the business model of other TV stations, which are different in style, but not really substance. 

Still, the Why They Hate Us question began to close once high-profile press critics like Jay Rosen of NYU started talking about a Trump-led “hate movement against journalists.” The president’s decision to escalate anti-press sentiment to the point of calling us “enemies of the people” has flipped the script.

Where Trump once rode to electoral victory by appealing to existing anti-press sentiment, and by mocking campaign coverage conventions that had been decades in the making, he is now described as the head of a top-down hate movement. He’s becoming the source of the Nile. Now none of this is our fault!

Before 2016, journalists noticed the decline in trust in their profession, and sometimes wondered at it. Occasionally, we conceded that liberal political leanings of individual reporters were a factor.

There was also talk in the business that audiences were jealous of our cool jet-setting lifestyles. Factual fiascoes like the WMD mess, the aforementioned Rather’s National Guard pieces, or my own Rolling Stone’s faceplant on the UVA rape case were sometimes mentioned as having contributed to loss-of-trust problems. 

At very rare times, it was considered that our insistence on covering events like Brett Favre’s retirement decision or the Casey Anthony trial like Watergate or a moon landing might perhaps impact the public’s ability to take us seriously. In my experience a reporter has to be in an advanced state of drunkenness before that one will come up.

Since the 2016 election, though, “Why do they hate us?” has become absolutely linked to Trump for most reporters. Audiences have similarly hardened. More than ever, we’re stuck in a binary proposition.

Either the media are a liberal cult, as Goldberg insists, or audiences are as Sullivan describes them: hopeless ignoramuses who reject their duty to self-inform.

Neither take is really accurate. The press is first and foremost a business, as commercial as selling cheeseburgers or underpants. We sell content, and what we don’t sell is far more important than what we do.

If you want to scan the vast universe of things neither Fox nor CNN shows the public, just peruse “Project Censored” sometime. As in a sci-fi/dystopian movie, we only hear about certain crucial truths about our society when accidents happen – for instance, when a hurricane hits.

Katrina forced urban poverty into view for a time. Hurricane Florence caused the New York Times and others to finally notice the toxic manure lagoons created by corporate pig farms that have been health hazards for ages.    

As in politics, there are huge areas of overlap in “left” and “right” media, between MSNBC and Fox. Both channels, despite seemingly opposite politics, need you to be in a state of mind that is identically receptive to advertising.

So neither channel will gross you out with stories about the maquiladora where Mexican workers are earning 70 pesos a day making your kids’ toys. They won’t scare you about the forests we’re clearing around the globe to feed the cattle we turn into cheap hamburgers advertised in between segments.  

And we rarely bore you about bank bailouts in between the Wells Fargo and Chase ads that are ubiquitously in your newscast, your Hulu feed, on the PGA tour, and plastered behind a serving Roger Federer at the U.S. Open.

There are whole ranges of other stories neither channel covers for other reasons, many of them involving the military or international financial institutions. But one story everyone can safely cover is how much we hate each other. There’s no institutional or commercial taboo that story violates.

That’s why 85 SENATORS, INCLUDING PROBABLY THE ONE YOU VOTED FOR, APPROVE OBSCENE $160 BILLION MILITARY INCREASE becomes “Trump snubs McCain during bill signing.” 

In the modern press, agreement routinely becomes discord by the time you see it. We addict people to conflict stories so our advertisers can remind them to indulge other addictions, like McDonald’s. 

It’s a perfect business model.