The piling on has begun. Last week Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz broke a front page story about CBS anchor Dan Rather's speech at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Texas. Considering that Rather is, as Kurtz puts it, "the longest-serving and most outspoken of the major network news anchors," this has, of course, thrown the right into a tizzy about liberal media bias. It certainly doesn't hurt that those who have long claimed Rather transparently favors Democrats now get to skywrite "I told you so."
This is not a particularly good time to defend Dan Rather. But it is a time to have some perspective. Besides the lame antics of those who have been shielding Rather, the latest scandal has brought about two seriously misguided reactions. The first is the predictable one: Conservative media critics like the Media Research Center head Brent Bozell have been teeing off on Rather, despite the fact that their cherished network, Fox News, is far more thoroughly biased than Rather would ever be. (See The American Prospect's recent take on Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly.) But then, the conservative media response to slip-ups by "liberal" journalists is always curiously loud for a group that is supposed to be oppressed to the point of voicelessness.
The Rather incident has also brought out of the woodwork all the postmodernist thumbsuckers who insist journalists can't possibly be objective, and therefore celebrate Rather for helping to confirm their presuppositions. These sophisticates also swallowed the Bush-Baker line that it was impossible to know who won in Florida, because election board chad counters are fallible human beings. (See the logic? For more on the Florida recount and postmodern rhetoric, check out these articles by Win McCormack in The Nation and Alan Wolfe in Salon.) The relativist approach unhelpfully collapses any distinction between Dan Rather and real partisans masquerading as journalists, like Fox's Tony Snow.
It's important to think about the Rather scandal in the context of two other fairly recent incidents in which network anchors have gotten themselves into trouble. Conservatives -- including the reliable Bozell -- also went on the attack when CBS's Bryant Gumbel was caught on the air referring to a religious rightist he'd just been interviewing as a "fucking idiot." By contrast, almost no attention has been paid to a recent Newsday article noting that executives at Fox are angry at their anchor Tony Snow, who hosts the ostensibly straightforward Fox News Sunday, for the appearance of his syndicated column on the Republican website GOPUSA.com. (It appears Snow's column has been taken down from the site, but it still runs on the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation's Townhall.com.)
A reasonable ranking of Rather, Gumbel, and Snow, from most to least biased, would run as follows: Snow . . . Rather, Gumbel. Both Snow and Rather outstrip Gumbel, because they've been caught red handed at partisan events. But in this respect, Snow outdoes Rather by a mile. Snow got in trouble for giving a televised speech at last summer's Republican National Convention, and before he was a "journalist," he was President George Bush I's head speechwriter. Plus, if you read Snow's right wing column it's almost laughably biased. Here's a typical Snow lead:
Question: Name one thing beneath Bill Clinton's dignity. Answer: This is a trick question, like asking whether zero is odd or even. It has no known answer.
Rather's partisan credentials simply cannot match that.
The conservative pundits who've been going after Rather, including whippersnappers like Jonah Goldberg, don't bother to mention the inconvenient example of Tony Snow. However, the Goldberg-edited National Review Online also ran a Rather column rather different from the rest by Michael Long, which does mention Snow. Taking the postmodern tack on the Rather incident, Long more or less applauds Rather's partisanship, writing:
The perpetual fervor for objectivity in our reporters has always been a lot of blather. Beyond identifying colors and reading eye charts, human beings are pretty much incapable of being objective at all.
Long uses the Rather incident to call for all mainstream journalists to come clean about their political views, the way members of Slate magazine's staff did just before the November election. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad idea, and it may even be a helpful proposal as a first step towards lessening media bias. But in terms of evaluating and diagnosing such biases, knowing an individual reporter or anchor's personal views is hardly the be all end all. Because -- to pull an old saw from a very different context -- it's not what you got, it's how you use it.
In introducing Slate's confessional, editor Michael Kinsley wrote:
Bias is a failure to suppress your opinions or (if opinion is in your job description) to state and defend your opinions openly. Like avoiding opinions, avoiding all bias is probably impossible. Among other difficulties, objectivity is not a huge safety zone. It is a narrow path between bias on one side and bottomless relativism on the other.
Slate's staffmembers voted largely for Gore, but that doesn't mean they're biased. Similarly, Dan Rather may or may not be, but just catching him giving a speech at a Democratic fund-raiser doesn't seal the case one way or the other. To show bias, you have to do the hard work of actually evaluating an individual journalist's work. (Granted, in the case of Tony Snow, it's not that hard. You just have to read one or two columns.)
So why the fervor over Rather's speech? Well, conservatives know that their attacks hit their target. No one likes to be criticized. So if Goldberg and company scream liberal bias enough, journalists will invariably begin to second guess themselves. The result may be reverse bias -- in which journalists favor conservatives for fear of being labeled liberal. Recent examples are myriad. Take the Marc Rich scandal (a Democratic imbroglio, to be sure). Compare the breathless round-the-clock coverage of that alleged quid pro quo with the relative yawns over President Bush's decision to reverse his position on carbon dioxide emissions after huge campaign contributors lobbied him. Or compare the press' attacks on Al Gore when he screwed up a few details in the debates to the way the press barely mentioned George W. Bush's misrepresentation of his own campaign proposals. And if one wants to evaluate the work of Dan Rather himself, look no further than his decision to declare Bush the winner of the presidential race before all the votes were counted -- a decision that many say led to Bush's ascendancy.
Relativists miss these complexities, because they avoid actually evaluating journalists' records to gauge the levels and directions of bias. "Of course Dan Rather is biased," they say; "Of course Tony Snow is a hack." But they can't say how much, and they can't explain why. So while the Goldbergs oversimplify (Journalists are a bunch of liberal brown-nosers), the Longs overcomplicate (The biases are ubiquitous and unmeasurable). God forbid that there might be degrees of bias, either in journalism or chad counting -- or that there might be measures that can be taken to deal with such biases. God forbid that the world might be complicated -- and also not entirely beyond our control.