Get Your Balance Elsewhere

By Thomas Griffith

One reason why it is easy to attack "the press" or "the media" broadly--and impossible to defend them broadly--is that there is not one set of standards that applies to everybody in the press. Nor can there be. When it comes to newspapers and televised network news, critics demand that they be evenhanded and that all opinion be carefully labeled. But there exists another vast part of the press, highly visible at any newsstand, where being one-sided ("specialized" is the preferred word for it) is the very reason for being. These journals set their own standards, which their subscribers happily submit to; and fairness is not necessarily one of the rules.

Don't ask a hunters' magazine to give the deer's side of the story. Don't look for lectures on chastity in Cosmopolitan or Penthouse. Don't expect defenses of Interior Secretary James Watt in an environmental journal. The unstated premise of all specialized magazines is: Get your balance elsewhere; we're writing for like-minded people.

As computers get more skilled at searching out audiences, new magazines proliferate. There are now about 60,000 periodicals, new and old, published in the U.S. and Canada. Their subjects range from Patchwork Quilts to Gun Talk, not to overlook Dirt Bike magazine. Many of their readers concern themselves with politics only when politics intrudes upon their pet interests. But if their audiences are big or possibly significant enough, politicians come chasing. Playboy, Jimmy Carter decided, appeals to young fellows who do not follow the news closely and would never sit still for involved arguments, but might respond to idealized noises made amiably. The result was the famous "lust in my heart" interview. Even after that furor, Ronald Reagan in 1980 submitted to the same Playboy interviewer, Robert Scheer, an adroitly argumentative questioner. Scheer interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times and for a profile in Playboy, and found Reagan to be secure in his convictions and eager for disputation. They talked so often on the campaign trail that Reagan once stage-whispered to Scheer a stock line from old Hollywood movies: "You know we'll have to stop meeting like this."

Then there are the specialized magazines whose specialty is politics itself--which further confuses the idea of fairness standards. Readers of journals of opinion on the left or right, such as the New Republic, the Nation and the National Review, generally expect to see their own attitudes confirmed and their enemies savaged. (In the National Review they hope to see their own case put more stylishly by Editor William F. Buckley Jr.) Journals of opinion pursue subjects of particular interest at greater length than newspapers, but, in no small measure because their budgets are small, these subjects are often treated with more depth of feeling and reflection than depth of reporting.

The evenhanded thing to say about journals of left and right is that polemical intensity is equally fervent on either front. Yet in the era of Reagan this happens not to be so. The liberal New Republic didn't much like Reagan's State of the Union message but didn't like the Democratic alternative either, and editorially suggested that the times are so tough a little bipartisanship is called for. On the far right the reaction to Reagan was anger at betrayal. John D. Lofton Jr. couldn t wait to express himself in the Conservative Digest, the magazine he once edited, but got it off his chest in the Washington Times, the Moonies' new newspaper. He called Reagan a "political 'Tootsie' . . . wearing clothes which quite frankly (at least when he was a candidate) I was unaware were in his wardrobe. And the maddening thing is that despite the fact that he is now decked out again figuratively speaking, in a big floppy hat, a skirt, high heels, wearing bright red lipstick and carrying a purse, the President and his men tell us--with straight faces--that there has been no change!"

Musing on these fulminations, Washington Post Columnist Haynes Johnson concluded that right-wingers "are very different from you and me. They have more bile." It may also be that liberals, centrists and conservatives are more accustomed to accommodating, to doing things together, while the radical right is a crowd of spiky individualists. But any definition of the press has to be wide enough to include them too, and others who live by their own rules This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.