THE MEDIA ELITE: AMERICA'S NEW POWER BROKERS
S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter
Bethesda, Maryland: Adler and Adler, 1986
342 pp., $19.95
On occasion an argument so consumes those engaged in it that they stop trying to think things through soberly and seek only to score points. Such is the case with the long-running argument over whether the American press has a liberal bias.
The primary parties to the argument are, of course, political conservatives and the press itself. Conservatives tend to see the press and the picture of the world it purveys as disproportionately liberal and Democratic. In return, journalists often think they are unfairly picked upon and, as a defensive response, argue either that they aren't distinctively liberal at all, or that their political outlook is a trivial detail that little affects the way they do their jobs. These media claims infuriate conservatives, spurring them to sponsor or publicize studies that "prove" that the press is liberal and that its liberalism does affect reporting. Then, members of the press wonder what the conservatives really want to accomplish: If the press is "proven" to be consequentially liberal, what is to be done about it? It may be fun to listen to the name-calling for a while but not for long.
Researchers contemplating work that puts them right in the middle of the argument over press bias need to have thick skins; they are certain to be assailed whichever way they turn. When political scientist Stanley Rothman founded the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change at Smith College and decided that one of the center's first projects would be an examination of the outlook of journalists, he certainly knew what he was getting into. So did S. Robert Lichter, a George Washington University political scientist who wrote The Media Elite, the book that resulted from the study. So, of course, did Linda S. Lichter who carried out the research. Still, they must find it more than a little frustrating that their efforts, which represent honest and competent scholarship, are being dismissed by media reviewers as little more than the latest round of shelling by conservatives of journalistic redoubts.
One example of the attack is New Republic editor Michael Kinsley's broadside in The Washington Post. Kinsley calls The Media Elite "a tendentious piece of pseudoscientific rubbish of just the sort that drives conservatives up the wall when it doesn't serve their purposes." He employs mocking quotation marks in references to the research the Lichters and Rothman conducted, the proof they offered for certain assertions, and the experts they consulted. The work is "lunatic scientific" and "nonsense." All's fair in war, Kinsley apparently believes, and it's war between the conservatives and the press over the bias issue. Take no prisoners.
The Research Design
Let's step back and examine what the authors of The Media Elite set out to accomplish, and how they went about it. They argue that the national press (which includes network television news, leading papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the big weekly news magazines) has become a major political institution in the
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