Myth of the Liberal Media

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Unlike most of the publications named above, liberals, for some reason, feel compelled to include the views of the other side on a regular basis. New York magazine, in the heart of liberal country, chose right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson as its sole national correspondent. During the 1990s, The New Yorker—the bible of sophisticated urban liberalism—chose as its Washington correspondents another right-winger, the late Michael Kelly, and the soft, neoconservative Democrat Joe Klein. At least half of the “liberal New Republic” is actually a rabidly neoconservative magazine where both Kelly and the self-professed conservative Andrew Sullivan served as editors in recent years. Before his death in Iraq while covering the war, Kelly was also a top editor of The Atlantic Monthly—a mainstay of establishment liberalism—and during his tenure added a bunch of Weekly Standard writers to its stable.

Move over to mainstream publications and news shows often labeled “liberal,” and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal bias becomes. The New York Times editorial page features a regular column by the unreconstructed Nixon speechwriter William Safire, and Bill Keller also writes regularly from a conservative Democratic perspective. The Washington Post is just swarming with strident conservatives, from George Will to Charles Krauthammer. 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 that of Reagan cabinet member William Bennett, Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson. Care to include ABC News? Again, I don’t, but if you do, how do you deal with the fact that the only ideological commentator on its Sunday show is George Will? Or how about the fact that its only explicitly ideological reporter is the journalistically challenged conservative crusader John Stossel? How to explain the entire career, both there and on NPR, of Cokie Roberts, who never met a liberal to whom she could not condescend? What about Time and Newsweek? In the former, we have Krauthammer holding forth, and in the latter, Will.

I could go on, but the point is clear: Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. Even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match—in size, ferocity, or commitment—for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

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