Confessions of A Closet Leftist

By Laurence Zuckerman

The debate over political bias in the press is as old as newspapers themselves. For years right-wing critics have complained that the U.S. news media are a bastion of anti-Establishment liberalism, while left-of-centers charge that ownership by corporate conglomerates has turned the country's newspapers and TV networks into profit-hungry servants of the Establishment. Rarely, however, does the debate get down to cases. What would happen, for example, if a radical socialist went to work, politically incognito, for some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers?

That is the question raised by the extraordinary confession of veteran reporter A. Kent MacDougall. Writing in the Monthly Review, an obscure socialist magazine (circ. 7,000), MacDougall declares that during his 24-year career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, he "helped popularize radical ideas" as a "usually covert, occasionally openly anti-Establishment reporter." A journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1987 (he is now on sabbatical), MacDougall, 57, says that only the security of tenure finally enabled him to reveal himself as a "closet socialist boring unobtrusively from within ((the)) bourgeois press." His epitaph: "Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my all-time favorite journalist. But my employer for a decade was the Wall Street Journal."

MacDougall was quickly singled out by conservative critics as living proof of the press's alleged liberal slant. "It shows once more how easy it is to % hoodwink our media elite," wrote Reed Irvine, chairman of the right-wing pressure group Accuracy in Media (AIM). The conservative weekly Human Events said MacDougall's revelations will no doubt "raise concerns about the ability of Marxist agents to penetrate the mainstream media." The Wall Street Journal issued a statement expressing its outrage. "It is troubling," said the Journal, "that any man who brags of having sought to push a personal, political agenda on unsuspecting editors and readers should be teaching journalism at a respected university."

MacDougall now maintains that his tongue was firmly in cheek when he implied in his articles that he had pursued a secret agenda. The point of the article, he says, was to debunk radical misconceptions about the daily press. "Rigid- minded right-wingers and rigid-minded left-wingers have a lot in common," he adds. "I wanted to knock down the conspiracy theories by pointing out that individual reporters can get across a lot of uncomfortable truths to the public."

Whatever his motivation, MacDougall's shadowy career does reveal something about the limits of ideological bias in the mainstream media. MacDougall stresses that his beliefs merely influenced the types of stories he tried to pursue. "I was first and foremost a journalist," he says, "and I stuck to accepted standards of newsworthiness, accuracy and fairness."

Many of his pieces, including profiles of radical historians and economists and lengthy series on inequality and deforestation, are well-reported stories that stand up to scrutiny nearly 20 years later. Writing in the AIM newsletter, author Joseph Goulden finds bias in a 1970 profile of journalist I.F. Stone because MacDougall neglected to say that Stone had been a doctrinaire Stalinist (a charge Stone dismisses as "absolute nonsense"). In fact, MacDougall's article does quote Stone as saying that he was a "Communist-anarchist" in his youth and had since come to describe himself as "half a liberal, half a radical."

MacDougall's former editors remember him as a cantankerous man whose meticulous and exhaustive reporting was worth the trouble. "He was a star," says William Thomas, the recently retired Los Angeles Times editor who recruited MacDougall as a special writer in the late 1970s. Michael Gartner, who edited MacDougall's front-page Journal stories in the 1960s, and is now president of NBC News, calls him an "editor's dream. He was a very thorough, very careful, very good reporter."

^ Both men insist that MacDougall's stories had to pass through a gauntlet of editors who would have prevented him from pursuing any hidden agenda. "It might happen once," says Thomas, "but then a flag would go up." Gartner believes the presence of a socialist on the paper probably benefited Journal readers. "Diversity on the staff is something you hope for," he notes. MacDougall says this was exactly his point. Upset by the hostile response, he has produced a revised version of the MR article that will appear in the upcoming issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.