Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON – When an independent panel criticized CBS News last week for “misstatements and omissions” in its report on President Bush’s National Guard service, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh seized on the episode as an example of liberal media bias.

“The execs didn’t see this because they all had the same agenda, and that is – get Bush,” Limbaugh told his audience of millions Tuesday. “It’s inescapable what was going on. There was an agenda to get a president. There was an agenda to affect the outcome of an election.”

The same feelings of fury and self-vindication were evident just days earlier on the left, as liberals reacted to the revelation that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams had received $240,000 from the Education Department to promote Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.

They too, saw larger forces at play.

“It’s important that Democrats ensure that the GOP is not able to scapegoat the White House out of responsibility for this,” said a posting on the liberal DailyKos Web site, part of a frenzied discussion on Williams. “Williams’ bribe is part of a larger scheme to propagandize the media orchestrated by the White House.”

The humiliation of two media figures, Williams and CBS anchor Dan Rather, within four days of each other highlights and exacerbates the long-running, angry battle to define the media as biased in one direction or the other. The fight has become part of the Washington game, stemming from heartfelt belief as well as political strategy.

The battle seems only to be escalating. When a 2001 book – “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News” – took sharp aim at alleged liberal bias, a counterpunch, “What Liberal Media?,” followed quickly, insisting that the press actually leans conservative.

A movie last year, “Outfoxed,” labeled Fox News Channel a right-wing tool. Entire organizations – such as Accuracy In Media, or AIM, on the right and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, or FAIR, on the left – are devoted to pointing out news pieces they consider slanted.

The Rather and Williams episodes have played directly into this battle.

“Partisans view the world through their particular perspective and rose-colored glasses,” said Jeffrey McCall, communications professor at Indiana’s DePauw University. “They are frequently looking for examples from the side they don’t agree with that the media is against them.”

Conservatives in America have traditionally complained the longest and loudest about biased reporting, and the notion of a liberal press – elitist and out of touch with real Americans – may have arisen initially from President Richard Nixon’s harshly adversarial relationship with reporters.

Nixon suggested that reporters were in league with long-haired protesters and at odds with the “silent majority” of so-called normal Americans. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, famously called journalists “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

The CBS scandal resonates in some quarters in part because conservatives have been suspicious of Rather since, as a White House correspondent, he aired hard-hitting reports on Nixon and the Watergate scandal. That prompted Nixon to ask him at a 1974 news conference, “Are you running for something?” Rather shot back, “No, sir, are you?”

That has lingered in some conservatives’ minds, but the notion of a liberal media, of course, extends far beyond Rather and CBS. It is accepted as gospel among a significant swath of the population that most of the media ignore or ridicule the views of conservatives, Christians and rural Americans.

“Sometimes it may be lack of a background, so they don’t give an appropriate context to conservative Christians,” said Sherrie Gossett, associate editor at AIM, the conservative media watchdog. “And sometimes those conservatives read that and think their views are being intentionally left out.”

Former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg captured this sentiment in the best-selling “Bias.” He compared the so-called media elite with the Mafia and himself to an insider who broke its code of silence by disclosing liberal bias, which got him “whacked.”

Meanwhile, Limbaugh portrays journalists as lying to suit their liberal agenda.

AIM recently released a list of the “most underreported/buried stories of 2004.” Among them: “How and why MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, perhaps the country’s leading climatologist, doesn’t accept the man-made global warming theory.”

Conservatives found grist for their complaints in a Pew Research Center survey last May concluding that journalists are significantly more liberal than the general public. For example, 34 percent of journalists at national media organizations called themselves liberal and 7 percent conservative; for the public at large, the figures were 20 percent liberal and 33 percent conservative.

The president has stoked distrust of the media and sought to use it to his advantage. When journalists were reporting about troubles in Iraq toward the end of 2003, Bush criticized the press.

“There’s a sense that people in America aren’t getting the truth,” Bush said. “I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people.”

The sense of grievance, of frustrated voicelessness, is equally strong on the left. Many liberals are angry not only because they believe the media are conservative but because they think the right has been so successful at pushing the idea of a leftist press.

In his 2003 book “What Liberal Media?,” journalist Eric Alterman said conservatives were “working the refs” – using the myth of a liberal media to intimidate journalists into giving more emphasis to conservative viewpoints.

“And it’s working,” Alterman wrote in an accompanying article. “Much of the public believes a useful but unsupportable myth about the so-called liberal media.”

The mainstream media actually are not particularly liberal, this argument goes.

“All of the same publications – The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, CBS News – that get accused of bias were also right on top of the Clinton story, the impeachment story, and arguably pushed it as hard as they pushed anything against Bush,” said David Mindich, who chairs the journalism department at St. Michael’s College in Vermont.

Others note that large corporations own most major media outlets, and they hardly have an interest in pushing radical ideas.

Like its conservative counterpart AIM, the liberal media watchdog group FAIR regularly trumpets stories it believes were covered with a conservative slant. FAIR criticized The New York Times for underplaying the number of civilians killed in the U.S. invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for instance.

More significant, liberals say, the conservative movement has built a powerful alternative media that dwarfs anything liberals can offer. Talk radio, with its millions of listeners, is almost entirely conservative. Fox News is a major broadcaster that, liberals say, is a right-wing mouthpiece. Regnery Publishing Inc. issues such books as “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.”

The real unholy alliance, these critics say, is between this right-wing network and a Bush administration reliant on the partisan media to do its dirty work.

“The Bush administration doesn’t need to say things specifically. They can just get their stooges to do it for them,” said Chris Lamb, a professor of mass communications at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

The administration may have played into the image of hostility toward an independent media by producing fake newscasts to promote its Medicare and anti-drug programs, something the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, has said is illegal.

As with the Rather episode for the right, Williams’ acceptance of money to promote a Bush education program confirmed some liberals’ deepest suspicions.

There is another view, however, that says both sides are right. The media are liberal in some ways – with their constant challenge to authority and tradition – and conservative in others, as in the aversion to radical change.

Few dispute that reporters are not infrequently guilty of bias of some kind. But by nature, some critics say, the press is unlikely to push the agenda of the radical left or right.

“Critics who charge the media with liberal bias or conservative bias – it says more about them than about the media,” said Martin Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor. “The media is primarily a profit-making institution that doesn’t want to get too far ahead of the public. Profits are based on the largest audience it can get. And it doesn’t get the biggest audience by getting far afield.”

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