DEAD PARROT
Number 33 -- Saturday, July 12 2003
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
The jubilation with which liberals greeted the two major Supreme Court rulings of this term's final weeks is understandable in a political season that has given our side little to cheer about. But like thirsty trekkers who come upon a water hole, we may have let ourselves be distracted from how desolate the land is and how far we have to go. In the Michigan affirmative action case, the Court narrowly allowed that race may remain a factor in admissions but struck down the point system that schools with large numbers of applicants have relied on. Or rather, it struck down that part of the point system that applies to race: "legacies" like George W. Bush and kids with a special talent for toting the pigskin or slapping the puck around will still get their points. Given budget constraints imposed by Republican tax cutting, it remains to be seen whether public universities like Michigan can afford the admissions staffs needed for the detailed case-by-case scrutiny that the Court required. Meanwhile, the White House, in another Memory Hole Moment, chose to forget all about Bush's January attack on the Michigan system (see DP #9: Affirmative Action Baby) and to laud the ruling for upholding "diversity."
The gay rights decision invalidating Texas's anti-"sodomy" law looks like a more solid win. The majority (6-3, as opposed to 5-4 in the Michigan case) is a little less shaky, and Justice Kennedy's acknowledgement that "the petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives" and that "the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime" had courtroom spectators in grateful tears as he read it (NY Times, 6/27). Subsequent gnashing of teeth by Jerry Falwell, which followed predictable road-to-bestiality lines, was amusing to read about; so was Ayatollah Rick Santorum's announcement, through a spokesman, that he had nothing to say.
Still, Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion makes it hard to come away from Lawrence v. Texas without a lingering sense of angst. He and Clarence Thomas are Bush's favorites on the Court, and the dissent, with which Thomas concurred, gives a clear indication of how both Court and country could turn if Bush gets to make one or two appointments. In it, Scalia argued that the state has a legitimate interest in criminalizing gay intercourse on behalf of citizens who think it immoral and that to rule otherwise is to cave in to the "homosexual agenda" and signal "the end of all morals legislation." The Constitution, he asserted, protects only "fundamental rights"--those "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."
But as Kennedy pointed out for the majority, the framers of the 5th and 14th Amendments refused to specify every right they were protecting, because "they knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress." In this category we might place the laws permitting ownership of slaves. The Supreme Court itself, in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, found that slaves had no legal rights; and the Constitution notoriously counted a slave as three-fifths of a human being for the purpose of apportioning a state's electoral votes, even as it gave him no vote of his own. Slavery was a practice so deeply rooted in our history and tradition and so universally regarded by the good citizens of a dozen states as the natural way of things under God that a war had to be fought to put an end to it. Scalia's claim that Lawrence v. Texas portends "a massive disruption of the current social order" not only begs the question of whether that order is ripe to be disrupted but also seems more than a little hysterical. Whatever disruption may ensue, it is coming not from the point of a bayonet but from a Court that, this time, has concerned itself with justice rather than with propping up the status quo.
The White House did its bob-and-weave on this decision, too. Ari Fleischer told reporters that "the administration did not file a brief in this case" and that "this is now a state matter"--though of course the point of the ruling was that it has become a federal one (Boston Globe, 7/2). Back when it was a state matter, Bush did have an opinion on it. Running for governor in 1994, he described the Texas anti-gay statute as "a symbolic gesture of traditional values" and vowed to veto any effort to strike it from the penal code.
Right now, some of the best news emanating from the Court is that no one seems to have decided to retire. Though we could hardly do worse than Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist, any of the others would-- given the person poised to appoint the replacements and the quality of those he has already named to lower courts--be a net loss. We should not forget that three of the five justices who preserved affirmative action and four of the six who extended legal protection to gays (and even two of the four who voted against confirming the theft of the 2000 election) were Republican appointees. But we cannot expect another Kennedy or Souter from Bush.
DP DOES THE NUMBERS
Number of military personnel who will fail to qualify for low-income child tax credit if Republicans do not agree to its extension: 200,000 (Times, 6/5)
Amount Bush cut from the budget for military family housing this year: $1.5 billion (Globe, 6/18)
Of the 500,000 public comments on the FCC web site, percent that opposed the new rules that the FCC then passed: 97 percent (Times, 6/5)
Amount that drug industry trade association will spend on lobbying in coming year: $150 million (Times, 6/1)
Average yearly drug costs for a Medicare recipient today: $2300 (Times, 7/2)
Average drug costs in 2007 if the prescription drug "benefit" now in Congress goes through: $2500
Average income of America's 400 wealthiest taxpayers in 2000:
$174 million (Times, 6/26)
Percent of the 400's income attributable to wages: 16.7 percent
Percent of all American income attributable to the 400: 1.1 percent
Factor by which the incomes of the 400 increased, from 1992-2000, relative to those of the bottom 90 percent of Americans: 15
Number of Americans with incomes over $200,000 who paid no income tax anywhere in the world in 2000: 2022
Maximum size of deduction that the new tax law offers business owners for buying a car: $100,000 (Times, 6/6)
Minimum weight of car required to qualify for deduction: 6000 pounds
DP REVIEWS
Among American conservatives, an article of faith--or, at least, a constant refrain--is that the media tilt to the left. The less evidence there is to support this notion, the more insistently right-wing voices like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Bernard Goldberg repeat it. Candidate Bush himself complained to the National Review in 1999 that the media "are biased against conservative thought"; and after the campaign had persuasively shown that, if anything, the media are biased against thought of all kinds, he flaunted Goldberg's best seller Bias on a pre-inauguration trip to Maine in 2001.
Now at last, in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? (Basic Books, 2003), we have a work that gives the lie to this preposterous canard. By analyzing coverage of the past few years' major political issues, Alterman shows that the idea of a leftward slant is a strategic fabrication, designed to capture the moral high ground for the Right. Though the Limbaugh faction derides victimization as a story line in race relations, it is quick to play the victim itself, however absurd the posture may be. The aim is, as in sports, to "work" the referee: no matter how fair a decision may have been, if you protest it vehemently enough the ref may call the next one your way.
The whole debate is skewed to begin with by the peculiar frame of reference of American politics. What's tagged as "liberal" here, Alterman points out, would seem far from it elsewhere in the world. The Democrats who stampeded to support Bush's Iraq war would be Tories, pure and simple, on the banks of the Thames. This spectrum shift inevitably reflects the financial interests of media owners, who are becoming fewer and fewer and richer and richer as conglomeration, with the FCC's blessing, accelerates. Though many working reporters probably have progressive leanings, the stories dance, in case of conflict, to the boss's tune. In coverage of campaign finance reform, for example, one of the most critical issues received virtually no attention: the media industry's own success in killing a provision that would have required cheap advertising rates for candidates.
As Mark Green shows in Selling Out (reviewed in DP #11), the cost of television ads, which is often driven up by bidding wars for prime slots, is the main reason why money has come to dominate American politics so utterly. Though 88 percent of countries, including Botswana and Ukraine, require free broadcast time for candidates, the "liberal" US is not one. In 1987, when Reagan's FCC overturned the 1949 Fairness Doctrine mandating equal time for opposing views, it changed the role of broadcasters, in the words of one observer, from "community trustees" to "marketplace participants." (The Appeals Court judges who upheld this travesty were named Bork and Scalia.)
Alterman divides his time judiciously between the wild excesses of right-wing commentators and the pusillanimous performance of the so-called "mainstream" media. The former make for especially lively reading. Coulter, in her book on Clinton, wrote that the only appropriate debate about him would be "whether to impeach or assassinate"--words which, if written about Bush in the post-9/11 climate, might have earned her five years in the slammer. The delicacy of her arguments can be seen in references to Hillary Clinton as "pond scum" and to Senator Jim Jeffords as a "half-wit," as well as in her comparison of the Today show's Katie Couric to Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels. She also urged that John Walker Lindh be executed "in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too." Her remark about anti-American demonstrators in the Arab world--that we should "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"--is perhaps too close to reality to qualify as an "excess."
Even the silliest charges of people like Coulter take on a life of their own when they enter the echo chamber of right-wing talk shows and commentaries. A couple of Alterman's anecdotes illustrate how, when a story becomes loud enough, its utter baselessness ceases to matter. As Enron was going bust, the Drudge Report, a web log with few scruples about fact checking, sought to deflect attention from Bush's long, cozy history with CEO Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay by announcing that Lay was a Clinton golf partner and had slept in the Clinton White House. Though these assertions were not true, they quickly made the rounds of the Chicago Tribune, Fox News, CNN's Crossfire, ABC's This Week, The Washington Times, the Times of London, and the New York Times. A similar explosion of falsehoods, also touched off by Drudge, took place during the Minnesota senatorial campaign in 2002, when efforts by Wellstone staff to bring volunteers from other states to help with registration were distorted into an attempt at vote-fraud. Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal all eagerly disseminated this lie.
Less entertaining but much more disturbing is Alterman's account of the abject failure of the mainstream to report the kind of information that a democracy needs if it is to remain a democracy. He shows how establishment stalwarts like David Broder of the Washington Post and R. W. Apple of the New York Times take it as their duty to avoid questioning either conventional wisdom or American leadership in a way that might be upsetting to readers. When Bush's vigilance before 9/11 came under scrutiny, Apple warned that debate on the subject would be too costly "to national unity, to confidence in the electoral process and to respect for leaders in general." Broder elevated show over substance by dismissing Reagan's deceitfulness as less important than "the grace with which he functions as chief of state in moments of national tragedy and triumph"; signers of a letter criticizing Poppy's Panama invasion were "left-wing politicians and activists" in Broder's view, even though they included former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair William Fulbright.
Kid-glove treatment of business is another mainstream trend, as shown by the leading papers' cheerleading for NAFTA despite its negative potential for US labor and by their subsequently embarrassing adulation of Enron, which the Times called "a model for the new American workplace" and Fortune lauded as "the most vigorous agent of change in its industry." But the piece de resistance in Alterman's critique is the coverage that reduced the 2000 election to a personality contest and fashion show. He quotes Cokie Roberts's fatuous summary of the choice facing Americans--"The story line is Bush isn't smart enough and Gore isn't straight enough"--and observes that "virtually nothing else, including the fact that the two men represent wholly different constituencies, differing philosophies of governance, and differing futures for the country was considered to be relevant."
The tacit no-issues ground rule meant that the campaign was simply a test of political theater--a Bush-Rove forté. They found it easy to take advantage of the fact that many reporters found Bush's locker room camaraderie ("I love you, man," he mouthed across a room at the Times's starstruck Frank Bruni) more appealing than Gore's stodgy attention to the details of the job he was campaigning for. It got so bad that when Gore knew the name of a foreign leader and pronounced it correctly, he could expect to be pilloried as a prig in the next day's papers; when he took a consultant's wardrobe suggestions, he would be ridiculed for having the wrong number of buttons on his suit; and when he asserted that he had helped with legislation promoting the internet, which was true, he would be slammed for claiming to have "invented" it. Meanwhile, Bush's copious lies about his own business and political history and current positions (which Alterman itemizes at length) went altogether unnoticed.
What this sad story means about the future of American politics remains to be seen, though the prospects are hardly encouraging. What it means about liberal bias in the media could not be clearer: there isn't any.