Where is the Liberal Media? (7/30/02, 8/1/02)
by Dean Hartwell
On a recent trip to the bookstore, I noticed Slander: Liberal Lies about
the American Right, the new book by Ann Coulter. From her frequent
appearances on political talk shows, I am familiar with her pro-conservative
Republican point of view. Still, I wondered about what she wrote inside the
book.
So, I picked up the book and read the first two pages. She writes that she is
angry with the “liberal media” and the terrible things they have supposedly
said about conservatives. I noticed a series of five negative words and phrases
with no attribution as to their author(s).
By checking her footnotes, I thought I thought I would learn about who she
thinks the liberal media is. Instead, I found four names that I did not
recognize. I could not classify the ideological position of the only person I
did recognize. If she had any plans to convince me of her point of view that
liberals dominate the media, she failed miserably. Like many people who express
an opinion, she failed to use facts to make a good argument.
My opinion is that liberals do NOT dominate the media. If they did, events in
the news since the last presidential election and our perception of them would
have been much different.
If the liberals had dominated the media during the last presidential
election:
Al Gore would be our nation’s president. There would have been no
recount after the election, either. The liberal media would have reported what
only the London Guardian and a few others did – that President Bush’s
brother, Jeb (Governor of Florida) and Secretary of State/Bush Florida Campaign
Manager Katherine Harris ordered a private company to remove tens of thousands of
legal voters from the voter rolls several months before the election. They
targeted for removal mostly black voters.
It isn’t hard to figure out why. Ninety-three percent of blacks who did manage
to vote chose Gore. Given that the slender margin of Bush’s “victory” was 537,
this loss of voters robbed Gore of victory several times over.
Greg Palast reports that no one in the United States media, with the exception
of Salon.com, published this story. Since Bush and Harris contracted out their
dirty work, “sunshine laws,” which allow the public to ask for and receive from
the government official documents, do not apply.
If the liberals dominated the media today:
President Bush would be subject to a Ken Starr-type scrutiny. If the
Whitewater non-scandal was good enough to take up eight years of media and
special prosecutor time, so, too, would Bush’s possible insider trading and his
loans from a company on whose board he served. All the attention from the
liberal media would give the Justice Department no choice but to appoint an
independent counsel.
We would hear daily how many days Osama bin Laden has been unaccounted for.
The media would tell us that the Bush Administration has failed to get bin
Laden “dead or alive” as Bush promised. It should be recalled that the media
kept us informed as to how many days our hostages were held in Iran during the
Democratic Carter Administration.
We do not live in a nation where liberals dominate the media. That should be
obvious to those of us who watch television, listen to the radio and read the
newspapers. Her book’s title brings to mind a quote by Adlai Stevenson:
“Republicans
will stop lying about Democrats when Democrats stop telling the truth about
them.”
(8/1/02) Dear Ann Coulter:
I apologize for an
inaccuracy in my 7/30/02 column. I wrote that your first five footnotes
pertained to four people whom I had not heard of and one person whose ideology
I could not discern.
After double-checking your book, I found that the first five cites referred to
Peter Perl twice, the News and Observer of Raleigh and North Carolina
and Maureen Dowd once each. One citation used a word or phrase that made no
sense. Thus, you referred to three people or media outlets I did not recognize
rather than four.
Now that I have admitted my mistake, please admit your mistake in telling us
that liberals dominate the media!
Sincerely,
Dean Hartwell
P.S. Here's another way our nation would be different if your phantom liberal
media truly existed:
Vice President Dick Cheney would have been hounded from office by now.
How many heart attacks does this man have to have before someone in charge
decides he is not physically fit for this office?
Now that his incredible fortune in stock from the company he once led has come
into question, will Bush nudge him out of the way like President Nixon did to
Spiro Agnew?
Agnew had some ethical problems over his penchant for taking bribes and evading
his taxes. When it became clear that Nixon might get impeached, Nixon's
associates in the Justice Department scared him into resigning in October 1973.
So now I will quote Yogi Berra: "It's like deja vu all over again."