Getting It All Backwards.(Eric Alterman decries media bias)

Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, apparently lives in an alternate universe from the one the rest of us occupy. According to Alterman. a contributor to the Nation magazine and MSNBC, there is no such thing as a "liberal" media. Or, if there is, it is "tiny and underfunded compared with its conservative counterpart," as he has subsequently written in the Nation.

In our role as pro-lifers, as long as reporters and editors are fair-minded and balanced in their coverage, it doesn't matter to us whether the "media" is predominately "liberal" or "conservative." However, Alterman's book is of interest to us because he uses abortion as one illustration of how "conservatives" are supposedly carrying the day.

Beyond wrongly limiting opposition to abortion to conservatives, Alterman simply mangles the truth, as we shall see below. By way of background, let's deal first with the general thrust of What Liberal Media?

To Alterman, the U.S.-based media outlets are, in the main, conservative. He writes, "The entire context of American politics exists on a spectrum that is itself well to the right of that in most industrialized democracies." He even refers to the general concept of a liberal media as the "So-Called Liberal Media" or "SCLM" for short.

Alterman's basic assertion can be reduced to this: U.S. media is by and large conservative, especially on fiscal issues, and middle-of-the-road/conservative on social issues. He believes that conservatives have done such a phenomenal job of yelling "fire" ("working the refs," as he has put it) that many media outlets have accommodated these complaints by providing a host of conservative columnists and pundits for readers to choose from.

On the opposing side, he claims that there are only a few outlets representing the "liberal" viewpoint in this country. He points to a litany of openly conservative media outlets while claiming that there are only a measly handful of liberal publications (such as the author's own, the Nation). If the media "tilt" in any direction, Alterman tells us, it is Right. (In passing, it is worth noting the obvious: that if someone is sufficiently to the Left, by definition most American media will seem "conservative.")

The focus of What Liberal Media? is with how reporters cover fiscal issues, but Alterman does weigh in on some social issues such as abortion. He declares that the media now treats the pro-life side with fairness.