I chafe at the truth that to everything there is a season. But impatience does make it all the more delicious when a much-needed season arrives at last. Just as the Times‘s recent editors’ note was an acknowledgment of what many an observer felt was surely true -– that the nation’s most influential paper was weak on skepticism in its pre-war coverage -– I am hopeful that we are now arriving at a closely related yet broader awareness: That the old “liberal media” charge is largely hooey, and dangerous hooey at that.
The notion has been repeated so often and with such effectiveness that it has come to be widely accepted (see Howie Kurtz’s report on the new Pew survey, “Fewer Republicans Trust the News, Survey Finds”). Consequently, the liberal-media charge -– hastened along by the dreaded stink one calls down upon oneself by writing or airing anything that can by ANY stretch be seen as exemplifying it -– has wormed its way into many a media organization’s heart. There, particularly in combination with post 9/11 hyper-patriotism, it has done a lot of damage — the sort of damage the Times acknowledged.
The increasingly evident truth, as we keep learning (and not just from the Times mea culpa — see also Michael Massing’s powerful work in The New York Review of Books), is that the media are anything but the never-listen-to-a-Republican types the liberal-media accusation makes them out to be.
Ken Auletta wrote a New Yorker piece of June 7 (“Big Bird Flies Right”) showing how far from fitting the label is, even in an organization supposed by the right to personify it: PBS. “On the Media’s” Brooke Gladstone did a piece on the Auletta story. As she notes, Auletta sets forth how, the political right having backed off criticism of NPR and PBS due to public pressure, the opposition is now coming “from a new quarter, from within the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) itself, the very institution that was designed to protect it.”
The season is here. Let the evidence accumulate!
