CONSERVATIVES have been complaining about media bias against them and the politicians who reflect their views for more than three decades – and in the past weeks they have been driven practically to the point of madness by the most recent manifestations of it in the current election season.
Could the New York Times really believe that the four letters of the word “bureaucrats” scrolling across a television screen for 1/30th of a second in a Republican television commercial were an example of “subliminal advertising” – a fraudulent conceit discredited before the astronauts walked on the moon?
Surely not. And yet the Times put a story about the ad on the front page after no less a partisan personage than Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore pointed it out to reporter Richard Berke. What could this be other than the conversion of journalism’s most formidable real estate into a not-so-subliminal advertisement for the Gore campaign?
And what could the TV talking heads have been thinking, accusing Rick Lazio of somehow misbehaving because he crossed over to Hillary Clinton’s podium with a pledge to ban soft-money fund-raising? Would any of them have objected in the same terms had Mrs. Clinton done the same thing?
Hillary’s supporters in the media have spent years telling us what a strong woman she is. And yet, in her first debate as a politician, they chose to characterize her as a neurasthenic Nellie under threat from two mean men, Lazio and moderator Tim Russert, who had the temerity to raise the question of her role in covering for the president during the Lewinsky affair.
Why? To conservatives, the answer is clear: Because it helps Mrs. Clinton, and liberals want her to win. For their part, mainstream media folk are infuriated by the charge that they are biased – and that feeling is not at all disingenuous.
In 1985, John Corry of the New York Times wrote a brilliant monograph detailing the existence of a “dominant media culture” that makes the bias possible. Corry said that a consensus existed in the press on issues that tend to the left side of the ideological ledger. It’s not a conspiracy, but a consensus so broad and self-aggrandizingly humanitarian that its acolytes are blind to their own prejudices.
The “dominant media culture” still exerts its influence in the realm of ideas, most especially in the area of gay rights. But it’s no longer focused on that realm. In its new form, the dominant media culture is dedicated to extraordinarily superficial attitudes about conservatives – which, perhaps due to their superficiality, have greater resonance than the fight over ideas.
How else to explain the weirdly puckish admission by Adam Clymer, the Times reporter George W. Bush called a “major-league a—-le,” last week that Bush had every reason to hate him?
After all, wrote Clymer, “About 18 months ago, I was editing an article describing how hard Mr. Bush was working to study national issues. With feeble gallows humor, I suggested that perhaps he needed the tutorials more than others. But while my comparable slurs of President Clinton, to cite one prominent example, stayed private, a spectacular typesetting blunder got my wisecrack printed.”
So Clymer basically calls George W. Bush an idiot and the sentence makes it into the New York Times. Why? That was no mere typsetting error. It happened for the same reason that Time magazine felt free to call Bush “Humpty W.” on its cover last week and (in a refrain echoed by Maureen Dowd of the Times yesterday) dubs Lazio “Little Ricky.”
It happened because the dominant media culture is now suffused with the notion that Republicans are morons. The idea is so common among them that it seems perfectly acceptable for it to appear in print.
To be sure, the notion was one element of the dominant media culture’s assault on Ronald Reagan – you know, the detached cowboy who quoted from Reader’s Digest – and found its most powerful expression in the caricature drawn of Dan Quayle from which Quayle could never separate himself.
Still, the dominant media culture was far more dedicated to the idea that Reagan was scary. Conservatives didn’t mind being attacked this way all that much. If you call someone dangerous, it gives him a certain power. But call someone stupid and you are not only belittling him – you are castrating him.
It’s a grotesquely unjust charge, but it’s easy to grasp – especially when conservatives like Bush and Lazio display tangible discomfort with the ideas they espouse, preferring instead to concentrate on intangible matters like character and integrity. Both candidates bear some responsibility for turning themselves into ideological eunuchs. But they don’t deserve to be treated with such contempt.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
