In Medias Res

Nick Gillespie from the August/September 1996 issue

Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, by Howard Kurtz, New York: Times Books, 407 pages, $25.00

Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism, by S. Robert Lichter and Richard E. Noyes, Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 320 pages, $58.50/$22.95 paper

Over the past quarter century or so, bashing the news media may well have supplanted baseball as the national pastime (certainly the news is filled with more strikes, balls, hits, and errors). From Spiro Agnew's alliterative attack on reporters as "nattering nabobs of negativism," to the bumper-sticker slogan "Annoy the Media, Re-Elect George Bush," to President Clinton's own spirited excoriations of the press's "insatiable desire...to build up and tear down," elected officials waste little time in attacking the self- styled adversarial media.

This may be one of the few areas in which people and politicians are completely in sync: Polls consistently show that about two-thirds of Americans think the press is "biased" (in various ways) and out of touch with average Americans. Last fall, a poll conducted by The Roper Center in conjunction with The Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation that analyzes free speech and press issues, found that only 10 percent of Americans had a "great deal" of confidence in the news media. (Washington politicians didn't fare so well, either: A mere 6 percent had a great deal of confidence in Congress, while Clinton garnered a relatively robust 16 percent rating in the category.) To be sure, outspoken and widespread skepticism toward the press (or the government) is nothing new. Back in 1807, for instance, then-President Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle....Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short."

Nor, contrary to the media's own self-interested fretting, is such incredulity anything to be overly worried about, at least for the country at large. Far from indicating some horrible and nihilistic trend in American cultural life, current attitudes toward the media are actually a return to an earlier, pre-World War II understanding of the press as inherently biased and subjective. Skepticism toward institutions of power is a healthy and necessary response in a free society. Intelligent people should cast wary eyes toward the media (along with politicians, pundits, and "experts" of all stripes). Journalists especially should understand this posture: It is, after all, simply a variation on the hoary journalistic directive that when your mother tells you she loves you, you should check it out.

Not surprisingly, though, journalists are not very comfortable with the realization that their audience sees them in less than ideal terms. Two recent books, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, by Howard Kurtz, and Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism, explore the often tortured--and tortuous--relationship between the political press, its subjects, and its audience.

Kurtz, a reporter at The Washington Post, is a representative of what he terms the "Old Media--the big newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts." He decries the rise of a "talk show nation, a boob-tube civilization, a run-at-the-mouth culture in which anyone can say anything at any time as long as they pull some ratings." Hot Air is a compellingly infuriating read: Even as Kurtz sets out to criti-que "the triumph of talk," he epitomizes the smug, dismissive, domineering, and pseudo-objective perspective that people hate about Big Journalism. Good Intentions, which focuses specifically on presidential campaign journalism, stands as something of a counterpoint to Hot Air and offers a compelling explanation of "why Americans hate campaign journalism." As the '96 election season shifts into high gear, Lichter and Noyes's analysis could hardly be more timely. "America is awash in talk," writes Kurtz at the opening of Hot Air. "Loud talk. Angry talk. Conspiratorial talk. Raunchy talk, smug talk, self-serving talk, funny talk, rumor-mongering talk. A cacophony of chat fills the airwaves from coast to coast, from dawn to dusk and beyond, all talk all the time." Where the "Old Media...still cling to some vestige of objectivity," says Kurtz, the talk shows--which run the gamut from The McLaughlin Group to Donahue to Oprah to Howard Stern's and Rush Limbaugh's radio programs--"revel in their one-sided pugnacity, spreading wild theories, delicious gossip, and angry denunciations with gleeful abandon."

To Kurtz, the proliferation of public voices has "coarsened" the "national conversation" and "reduced [it] to name-calling and finger-pointing and bumper-sticker sloganeering." Reduced from what is not exactly clear; Kurtz simply relies on vague incantations of a previous golden age of civil discourse undermined by "talk." The talk shows have other negative effects, too: They pervert politicians, who play to the pundits. They are incapable of dealing with complicated matters. They force the Old Media to adopt glitz to maintain an audience.

Curiously, Kurtz acknowledges there is good talk (C-SPAN, Nightline) and bad talk, effectively undercutting his argument. After all, an ample supply of beef that makes for easy access to filet mignon may well mean a McDonald's on every corner. While pretending to a certain objectivity--"the essence of journalism," he claims at one point, "is professional detachment"--it is hard to figure out what other than personal predilection informs his opinions. For instance, he claims that the debate over Clinton's health care plan was, "in the end, simply overwhelmed by talk." He admits that the plan was "fatally flawed" (!) but goes on to carp that "any attempt at reform was destroyed by a blizzard of half-truths and misinformation on radio and TV talk shows, in thirty-second attack ads, in rhetorical broadsides by every conceivable interest group." What some of us might see as democracy in action--a prolonged, robust, and hard-fought (if rancorous) debate--Kurtz instead dismisses as "a deafening roar." (He ignores serious and influential critiques of the plan such as Elizabeth McCaughey's in The New Republic.) Perhaps he is less troubled by talk per se than by voices with which he disagrees.

Similarly, he suggests that "talk" inherently favors conservatives because they are unthinking and oppositional. Here Kurtz may have a point--doctrinaire conservatives don't do much brainwork--but he goes on to quote Tom Braden, the original "left" co-host of Crossfire: "It's easier to be a conservative....As a liberal, you're not absolutely sure of where you stand or what in the world you ought to do about each particular problem." Since when have liberals lacked metaphysical certitude? This is simply partisanship masquerading as objectivity--the temptation to dismiss those who disagree with you as idiots is scattered across the political spectrum.

Kurtz also seems out of touch with the talk media, claiming there is "no real left wing" present. "When was the last time anyone stood up on a talk show and said the country should spend more money on the inner cities?" asks Kurtz, himself a regular on CNN's Reliable Sources. "Or that corporate executives are overpaid? Or that businesses are too quick to lay off innocent workers to compensate for management blunders and ill- advised mergers?" These points pretty much describe the stump speech of Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a frequent presence on TV and radio. And once you get past Rush Limbaugh, many of these quasi-populist complaints are voiced on talk shows with amazing regularity.

What really puts Kurtz out is what he sees as the phony objectivity of the talk-show culture. In discussing the granddaddy of the rough-and-tumble pundit show, The McLaughlin Group, Kurtz argues that the problem isn't merely that the panelists are usually wrong or obnoxious: "The trouble is the omniscient tone that requires professional journalists to pretend they are dispensing biblical wisdom from a televised Mount Olympus." Kurtz is right that McLaughlin's minions are famously awful in predicting the time of day, much less political events--and they are often annoying to watch.

But who exactly confuses the blustery pronouncements of The McLaughlin Group with "wisdom," biblical or other? (I might add that the main transmitting tower for biblical truth has traditionally been Mount Sinai, not Mount Olympus.) McLaughlin himself weighs in on the matter: "Give me a break! The image of a journalist as the self-important herald, the high priest of news, the mystique--it's been demythologized. And you know what? People love it! They see how unrealistic and how bogus is the identity of the journalist as the purist, the high priest. You could argue journalists have been cut down to size. They have become human."

Indeed, helping to unmask the blowhard--that is, human--nature of most journalists is perhaps McLaughlin's great contribution to contemporary society. It is impossible to watch the show and consume news in the same way. You realize that writers and broadcasters, no matter how colorless their prose or blank their expression in their "hard news" reportage, are individuals with particular opinions, perspectives, and angles on a given topic, that even the "facts" are open to widely discrepant interpretations. McLaughlin makes viewers realize "authorities" are often far less than authoritative. Understanding this doesn't undermine journalistic credibility, but it does qualify it--as it should.

It is precisely this dynamic which seems finally to stick in Kurtz's craw. For him, the media are literally a mediating presence between newsmakers (or, more precisely, lawmakers--he pretty much equates the two) and the rest of us. It bothers him when that mediating function is complicated or even made apparent. Part of his discomfort appears wedded to a lack of faith in people. Commenting on talk radio, Kurtz observes somewhat anxiously, "Many programs have settled on an anything-goes approach, leaving it to listeners to separate the rhetorical wheat from the chaff." The implication is that listeners are not sharp enough to tell the one from the other. They need someone to digest it all for them. Indeed, early on in Hot Air, Kurtz discusses the typical consumer of media as a cud- chewing passive recipient: "All the yammering out there undoubtedly reflects a populace fixated on the new and the novel, remote controls firmly in hand, grazing across the land of talk." Whether we are sheep or cows in Kurtz's paternalistic vision, we clearly need to be herded.