The Media's Wacky Watchdogs

By JOE QUEENAN

There are two kinds of media bashers in the U.S.: those who can't make a few bucks from it, and those who can. The first consists of millions of ordinary Americans who don't like journalists but do nothing more than moan about them. The second group is made up of full-time bashers who publish a lot of newsletters. Some of these professionals have a galling charm, a refreshing sassiness, perhaps even a mild sense of humor. Most don't.

Their ranks have grown during the past decade, perhaps because of the dearth of mainstream press criticism and journalism reviews, but more likely because of the satisfaction that can come from exposing the press as an insidious conspiracy. These groups now abound on the left and the right, groups with such names as Morality in Media and Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME). There are also aquatic watchdog publications such as Greenpeace Pundit Watch and watchdog books such as Unreliable [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media. One outfit even publishes an annual guide that rates journalists on a four-star basis, as if they were restaurants or portable vacuum cleaners. It is anybody's guess how much influence these groups have, but they're certainly a noisy bunch.}]The granddaddy is Accuracy in Media (AIM), a 22-year-old right-wing organization headed by Reed Irvine. A political gadfly who still blames the press for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Irvine reached prominence in the early 1980s when he lashed the press for not giving Ronald Reagan a fair shake.

Irvine's twice-monthly newsletter, AIM Report, remains obsessed with persuading the New York Times and Washington Post to admit that they shape the news to fit a liberal political agenda. His tirades against the Times even extend to making suggestions on decor: he wants the paper to take down its plaque honoring its 1930s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, whom he accuses of being a "Pulitzer prizewinning apologist for Stalin." Another Pulitzer prizewinner on Irvine's hit list is CNN's Desert Storm superstar, Peter Arnett, who, according to Irvine, "may have done more than any other single reporter to help make Ho Chi Minh's morale-sapping strategy work." Arnett, of course, does not have a plaque at the Times building.

For quality, resources and sheer volume of output, the new star on the right is the Media Research Center, an Alexandria, Va., organization founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III, former president of the National Conservative Political Action Committee. In addition to a monthly newsletter, MediaWatch, and the reference book And That's the Way It Isn't: A Reference Guide to Media Bias, the center also publishes TV, etc., a guide to left-wing influences in the entertainment business. Topics range from the plight of devout Christian actors forced to go undercover in atheistic Hollywood to the "radical environmentalist agenda" propagated by Ted Turner's cartoon program Captain Planet and the Planeteers.

Twice a month the center publishes Notable Quotables, a compendium of sometimes embarrassing, often idiotic but always verbatim quotes from various journalists. It also confers such dubious honors as the Linda Ellerbee Awards for Distinguished Reporting on the journalists making the dumbest remark in various categories. Why did the watchdog group single out the TV newswoman and best-selling author for its scorn? Says Bozell: "She epitomizes a liberal blowhard who has nothing to say."

Like Irvine, Bozell wants journalists to come clean about their true political orientation. "If TIME magazine wants to present a left-wing agenda, it has a responsibility to admit that," he states. "Objectivity is a myth." When asked how much influence liberal crusaders such as Margot Kidder and Susan Sarandon could possibly exert on the shaping of political debate in America, Bozell replies, "The entertainment medium is the strongest resource of the left today." This is not necessarily heartening news for the left.

Challenging these groups from the left is Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), founded in 1986. Headed by Jeff Cohen, a liberal commentator who is convinced that the media by and large favor the Establishment, FAIR seeks to focus "public awareness on the narrow corporate ownership of the press, the media's persistent cold war assumptions and their insensitivity to women, labor, minorities and other public interest constituencies." Its eclectic board includes writer Studs Terkel, pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, renowned thespians Daryl Hannah and Edward Asner, singer Jackson Browne and third-tier rock star Steve Van Zandt, the former guitarist with Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.

FAIR's bimonthly magazine, Extra!, draws attention to controversial stories that have been killed by TV stations, newspapers and magazines. It is probably best known for its merciless scrutiny of the guest lists of programs such as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and Ted Koppel's Nightline for evidence of cultural or political bias. One study determined that 90% of the U.S. guests on MacNeil/Lehrer were white and 87% were male, while the corresponding numbers for Koppel's show were 89% white and 82% male. Chris Ramsey, director of program marketing for MacNeil/Lehrer, defends the program by noting that it cross-examines the people in power, and that it's neither Robert MacNeil's nor Jim Lehrer's fault that by and large the people in power happen to be white males. Replies Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!: "Not all opinions are represented in government circles. I don't think that the spectrum of opinion in America runs from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to another."

Some of the media watchdogs have an extremely narrow focus. Lies of Our Times is an ultra-left-wing monthly produced by the Institute for Media Analysis, based, not terribly surprisingly, in New York City's Greenwich Village. Established in 1990, it has as its particular focus the "lies" that appear in "the most cited news medium in the U.S." -- the New York Times. As a bonus, the monthly also reports on "hypocrisies, misleading emphases and hidden premises," all for $2.50 an issue. Board members of the institute include such unapologetic leftists as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn and Ramsey Clark.

Lies of Our Times seems to despise everything the Times does, says or thinks. It accuses the paper of going out of its way to kick Fidel Castro, of ignoring Yasser Arafat's efforts to promote peace in the Middle East, of deliberately being mean to Nicolae Ceausescu and of overlooking the testimony of a waitress who once worked for Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby. In recent issues, Lies has denounced as "outrageously, insultingly, totally false" the seemingly plausible contention that the elderly in the U.S. have a relatively well-organized political lobby, and blasted a Times reporter for advancing the subjective view that Ronald Reagan was generally "respected" by the French. A one-stop leftist wailing wall, it also criticizes photos, captions, book reviews, the positioning of stories and even letters to the editor. By and large, it tends to leave the Food section alone.

If nothing else, the media hounds are a colorful group. The Washington newsletter Between the Lines bills itself as "your bi-weekly watchdog on the politics and personalities of the entertainment and news industries." Included among the menaces to the national well-being are Cher, Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen, Debra Winger, Tom Cruise, Tyne Daly, David Crosby, Shirley MacLaine, Dennis Weaver and Morgan Fairchild.

Lee Bellinger, the publisher, is the man who organized the 1985 blockade of the Mississippi River to free a Ukrainian sailor who had twice tried to defect to the U.S. by jumping ship. Alas, Bellinger's nautical skills far outstrip his editorial talents: Between the Lines is a disappointingly bland affair that lacks the right-wing vitriol of Accuracy in Media or the brass and savvy of the publications put out by the Media Research Center. A recent issue featured the entire text of a George Bush speech that the national media had unforgivably failed to reprint verbatim. It was no Gettysburg Address. In the same issue a story ran that chided Gloria Monty, executive producer of TV's General Hospital, for wanting to use the show to explore such issues as the environment and the plight of working-class people. The fiend.

For sheer wackiness, the most intriguing watchdog publication is the Repap Media Guide, a mammoth annual affair that rates publications and journalists as if they were low-fat frozen yogurts. (Repap is the name of the Canadian paper company that underwrites the project.) The guide is compiled by former Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, who helped convince Ronald Reagan of the merits of supply-side economics and has spent a good deal of time ever since trying to persuade the public that the deficits thus created do not really matter.

Now president of his own Morristown, N.J., consulting firm, Polyconomics, Wanniski has tried to draw attention to his quirky brainchild by bashing a slew of famous journalists of both the left and right while fawning over the Washington Times, the right-leaning newspaper owned by members of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. His attacks do not appear to have inflicted serious damage on the careers of either Lewis H. Lapham, liberal editor of Harper's, or William F. Buckley Jr., conservative editor of National Review. But then, Wanniski has been putting out the guide for only six years.

Wanniski, whose business clients include Michael Milken (who, although in prison, is in regular phone contact with Wanniski), refuses to divulge the identities of the mysterious "media junkies" who help him compile his ratings, but among them there are at least two alumni of Lyndon LaRouche's fanatical groups, as well as public relations flacks, a social worker, a playwright, typists, salesmen, a medical secretary and people who called in to a Denver talk-radio program and asked to be reviewers. A man who has accepted money from felon Milken, has gone on Asian junkets paid for by felon Moon and has relied on media ratings supplied by proteges of felon LaRouche, Wanniski is the media watchdog with the most serious credibility problem.

Watchdog publications allow hobbyists and rank amateurs an opportunity to get their digs in at well-paid professionals. These periodicals bristle with jeremiads by professors from obscure universities, by authors whose books have been published by Asklepios/Pagan Press, and by unheralded theorists such as the project director of Redstockings Women's Liberation Archives for Action, whatever that may be.

The sense that full-fledged journalists could perhaps do a better job than dilettantes as investigative reporters is reflected in the watchdogs' errors of omission. One issue of Extra! criticized Forbes magazine for publishing a bullish story on the Mexican economy without noting that the study from which the article was adopted had been funded by $10,000 contributions from 29 corporations -- each with a financial interest in Mexico. A more thorough investigation by FAIR staffers might have unearthed the fact that one of those $10,000 contributions was from Milken, and that the report was prepared by Polyconomics, owned by none other than self-coronated media watchdog Wanniski. But nobody's perfect.

Much of the material in these publications is interesting, and some of the criticism is justified. But the watchdogs frequently undercut their own credibility by their whininess, their grating tone of moral rectitude and % their compulsive nit-picking. A case can be made that people who write articles critiquing photo captions in the New York Times really ought to get out more.