Digby's Hullabaloo

Fair And Balanced

by digby

Conservative bloggers and commentators know how to turn up the heat on mainstream media. Glenn Beck did it one day last week on his Fox News program. Theatrically unhinged, he directed viewers to call their local newspaper and demand coverage of ACORN, the national community action group targeted in an embarrassing hidden video sting.

“Right now, get off the couch. While I’m talking, you pick up the phone. You call the newspaper,” he commanded. If ACORN hasn’t been on the front page, or if the paper isn’t investigating the group’s local activities, “then what the hell are they good for?”

Shortly, The Post and other papers were flooded with angry calls and e-mails.

It’s tempting to dismiss such gimmicks. Fox News, joined by right-leaning talk radio and bloggers, often hypes stories to apocalyptic proportions while casting competitors as too liberal or too lazy to report the truth.

But they’re also occasionally pumping legitimate stories. I thought that was the case with ACORN and, before it, the Fox-fueled controversy that led to the resignation of White House environmental adviser Van Jones.

Jones had issued two public apologies before The Post finally wrote about him. One was for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech before joining the administration. The other was for signing a 2004 petition that said members of the Bush administration may have “allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext to war.” Conservatives had attacked Jones for more than a week before the first Post story appeared Sept. 5. He resigned the next day.

With ACORN, The Post wrote about it two days after the first of several explosive hidden-camera videos were aired showing the group’s employees giving tax advice to young conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her pimp. Three days passed before The Post ran a short Associated Press story about the Senate halting Housing and Urban Development grants to ACORN, which operates in 110 cities. But by that time, the Census Bureau had severed ties with ACORN. State and city investigations had been launched. It wasn’t until late in the week that The Post weighed in with two solid pieces.

Why the tardiness?

One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like The Post simply don’t pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints.

It “can’t be discounted,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Complaints by conservatives are slower to be picked up by non-ideological media because there are not enough conservatives and too many liberals in most newsrooms.”

“They just don’t see the resonance of these issues. They don’t hear about them as fast [and] they’re not naturally watching as much,” he added.

Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he worries “that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It’s particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view.”

To guard against it, he said, “I challenge our reporters and editors with great frequency to look at what is going on across the political spectrum . . . at the extremes, among the rabble-rousers, as well as among policymakers.” He said he pressed the National desk this week to provide more ACORN coverage.

I’ll be waiting with bated breath for their in depth coverage of what’s happening among the left wing rabble-rousers who, the last I heard from the Washington Post, were rude, profane miscreants for even suggesting that the paper wasn’t adequately covering the myriad Republican scandals. (“It’s particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view.” Does anyone recall such concerns during the long era of Republican dominance?)

Back during the presidential campaign I predicted that the right was going to manufacture some scandal about Obama and I thought it would probably have something to do with corruption in Chicago. I was off on that prediction, but I think I see the contours of the scandal machine emerging now in a slightly different way. Indeed, it’s much more consciously racial than I would have predicted, but it’s even more than that. The subliminal racist association with Obama is just part of it — ACORN, Van Jones and the impending attacks on SEIU are all attacks on institutions and individuals which politically organize the poor and minorities and encourage their involvement in the electoral process. It’s clever and quite politically useful for the right to target those whom they can’t expect to win over and demobilize some of the most effective ground operations and grassroots leadership of the Democratic Party. They’ve always been about the vote suppression. And they always think ahead.

The methods of dissemination are the same as they ever were. They push the “scandal” through the right wing noise machine, work the refs hard (which isn’t hard to do because the villagers are convinced that the right wing represents “Real America”) and they create the illusion that something “doesn’t pass the smell test.” Here, we see that the wingnuts have convinced the Washington Post that “something is wrong,” that the “Van Jones story” was a huge deal which they failed to cover and that they need to be more vigilant about ferreting out these important issues. At the same time the villagers are busily convincing themselves that the fact that all these players are black is coincidental and irrelevant because none of them have a racist bone in their bodies and yet they “feel” there must be something to all this. In fact, I think they are probably in the process of convincing themselves that only by relentlessly covering these scandals can they prove just how colorblind they really are.

Unfortunately, the left won’t be able to counter this by writing as many emails or complaining more vociferously since such tactics only reinforce the Village’s apparent fear that the liberals have taken over, thus motivating them to be even more vigilant in presenting the “opposing view.” I’m not sure what to do about this, but I’m not sure one has to. After all, it’s not like this is anything new. The last ombudsman also lamented the alleged lack of proper deference to conservative points of view in their straight reporting:

Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage — and that’s as it should be. But it’s true that The Post, as well as much of the national news media, has written more stories and more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain. Editors have their reasons for this, but conservatives are right that they often don’t see their views reflected enough in the news pages. . . .

The Post’s latest circulation losses were less than many large papers suffered, and business executives say the advertising downturn has more to do with the economy than with political coverage. That said, the imbalance still needs to be corrected

If papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times (which also believes it needs to give conservatives special attention) really believe that their precarious financial future is served by following the Glenn Beck agenda, then we won’t have to worry about them much longer anyway.

Update: From Andrew Sullivan an observation to which the Washington Post should probably pay attention:

A reader recently made a very interesting reference. He said he believed that the GOP was morphing into the American equivalent of the Parti Quebecois. It is essentially a regional party now – representing the South in the national discourse. And its rhetoric seems divorced from any desire to actually hold responsible public office. So Republicans, like the Quebecers, tend to use politics as a means for disruption or protest or threat or veto.

It’s also worth remembering that the huge amount of noise on the far right is actually quite narrowly based. Here’s a fact from the Time profile of Beck:

In 1987 comedian David Brenner bombed in syndication with about 2.5 million viewers at midnight — which is roughly what Fox, the leading network for political talk shows, averages in prime time.

There is certainly a very angry far right base out there. But it would be foolish to over-estimate it.

h/t to bb

Update II: Oh Geez. Rick Perlstein has a great discussion of this at Columbia Journalism Review. Just read it.

Rick Perlstein: I read what Brauchli said, and what he was paraphrased as saying, and it almost suggests to me that Matt Drudge is becoming his assignment editor. I mean, why would a newspaper like the Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think well or ill of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things—and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.

The real story is that millions of Americans don’t consider a liberal president legitimate, and they’re moving from that axiom to try to delegitimize the president in the eyes of the majority. And one of the ways they do that is, frankly, by baiting the hook for mainstream media decision-makers who are terrified at the accusation of liberal bias. It really looks like Brauchli is falling for that

Update III: Jamison Foser is also on the case, with this piece today and an earlier one responding directly to Alexander’s original column. Apparently “ideological diversity” means the entire spectrum from Krauthamer to Hiatt.