As apt as is the title of Eric Boehlert's book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, it could still be targeted by the right as being more partisan than this exposé of the MSM really is. "Missing With Pinpoint Accuracy" would be at least as accurate minus the somewhat partisan tone of the actual title.
Indeed, if one is looking for a good, ripping, liberally partisan attack on the increasingly right wing MSM, they may be disappointed. In virtually nowhere in Eric Boehlert's book can one find a liberal political agenda. Lapdogs is concerned with one agenda: Truth and fairness in journalism.
And on both counts, in Boehlert's 296-page sustained attack on his own industry, the MSM failed miserably time and again.
You might think, given the subject matter, the bulk of Lapdogs might be devoted to attacking the blatantly partisan Fox News but you'd be wrong. Realizing that would be like shooting fish in a barrel, Boehlert instead turns his unforgiving gaze on what Michelle Malkin (herself a frequent target) calls "the dinosaur networks", as well as the major print and online newspapers and magazines.
Lapdogs, part of a spate of books to come out since Norman Solomon's 2005 War Made Easy, starts off promisingly with an introduction ("Afraid of the Facts") that starts like this:
It must have been an awkward encounter when Bob Woodward sat down for two hours at his Washington, D.C., attorney's M Street office on November 14, 2005, to answer questions, under oath, posed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Woodward, of Watergate and Washington Post fame, was the most famous reporter of his generation, and Fitzpatrick, by the fall of 2005, was the most talked-about investigator in America.
Mr. Boehlert then warms up to his subject in Chapter Three ("Noted at ABC") in which he exposes ABC's inexplicably influential online tip sheet, "The Note", for the pack of GOP partisan hacks that they are. Exposing their conservative bias at the expense of the news, Boehlert also tells us how, ironically, this most Republican entity was in itself attacked for being liberal by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, the Prince of Pundits, when ABC's political director and
Note founder Mark Halperin, who's hardly a rock of liberal thought, wrote a 2004 internal memo to his staff asking that both Kerry and Bush be held accountable for making misstatements instead of merely covering those gaffes. It was the kind of slip (i.e. expecting non-partisan fairness in reporting) that has resulted in the destruction of many more journalistic careers than those of Ashleigh Banfield, Eason Jordan and Dan Rather.
Boehlert keeps up the pressure, if not actually stepping it up, by segueing in the next chapter, "The Press Haters", which is devoted to how much influence is wielded by conservative bloggers like the Three Stooges of Powerline, Michelle Malkin and professional pundits like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. As with The Note and all-too-many news organs, these self-appointed spinmeisters act as rodeo clowns of distraction for the administration in the unlikely event that George Bush is ever gored by a pointed question.
Time and again, Mr. Boehlert brings into conspicuous relief an intolerant administration that's constantly twitching to decry as liberal a supine, lapdog MSM that, with somewhat of an exception with Hurricane Katrina, manages to miss the big stories and/or the big points with pinpoint accuracy.
Well- and exhaustively researched, making use of Nexis, TVEyes, Media Matters and other media-related monitoring/watchdog groups, Boehlert proves time after time, albeit in repetitive terms (his favorite word when writing about the MSM appears to be "timid" or "timidity", as well as "supine") at a vast and longterm media conspiracy to keep their consumers at arm's length from the truth and the GOP-dominated government equally at arm's length from public opinion.
In fact, on his chapter on former CBP Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson (Chapter 5, "The War Over PBS"), Lapdogs paints a very chilling picture at how, far from a nonpartisan press simply being inept and willfully negligent, far to the right the MSM's political bias or allegiance has swung since the Clinton years (especially since January 20, 2001). Chapter Five exposes Tomlinson for being the typically incompetent GOP stooge that he was in shooting PBS and NPR in the foot for creating a liberal bias controversy out of literally nothing, thereby upsetting the cozy relationship between the CPB and the Capitol Hill lawmakers who weren't prepared to slash the Center for Public Broadcasting's budget until the Bill Moyers-obsessed Tomlinson began crying Wolf.
Like a starfish exerting constant pressure on alternating points, Boehlert pries open for the layman the clam-like mainstream media and its often-Byzantine world, the decision-making processes that determine what is newsworthy and what isn't. (A small sample: In the final chapter, "Still Afraid of the Facts", Boehlert's research brings up a clip of Bush telling the American public in '04, "(A)nytime you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires... a court order." Yet, despite the fact that this was proof positive, after the NSA wiretap scandal was broken by the NY Times and that it caught the FISA-indifferent Bush in a lie, CNN, between Dec. 2005 and February 2006, made just four airings of the clip. In the same 12/05-2/06 time span, however, CNN saw fit to mention Angelina Jolie no less than 35 times. And that's a mild example of the bias and imbalance that's become the norm in American journalism.)
Lapdogs was obviously rushed through the press (Boehlert makes mention of events that took place just last March) and the two dozen or so typos, beginning with the second word in the book, makes one think that perhaps Boehlert didn't even review the galley proofs before submitting it back to the editors of Free Press. But that should be a testament as to how vitally this book needs to be made accessible to the news consumer.
It's a book that makes the concerned and perspicacious reader think and, as much as Norm Solomon's book opened up my eyes, Lapdogs has opened them up a little wider. Among the most important and alarming revelations that I've learned through this book:
The MSM's capricious, GOP-friendly and often erroneous definition of what is newsworthy.
Blogs represent an untapped demand for real news, a fact that has, inexplicably and maddeningly, not been picked up on by the MSM.
The second Bush administration marks perhaps the first time in American journalism history in which the MSM has been openly hostile, even contemptuous, of its own consumers. We're hearing the same lines that we hear from the prickly administration: "We know what we're doing. Trust us. How dare you question us?"
The MSM makes the radical right look mainstream, legitimate and reasonable while ignoring or openly ridiculing the left, suggesting, 1) that a radical right doesn't exist and 2) that a radical left does.
The Bush administration treats the slothful MSM as if it's a saber-toothed tiger and the MSM, amazingly, continues taking the whips on the back. The NY Times, with the obvious partisan flak-meister Bill Keller, who actually ignored the Downing St. memos under the pretext that it was a mere "British election story", is a classic example.
The MSM appeases a small percentage of lunatic fringe crackpots while ignoring the much larger demographic of news-starved consumers.
It's no coincidence that as the WaPo and NY Times have declined in readership and influence, the blogs, particularly the left wing blogs that are generously quoted by Boehlert, had inherited that readership and influence. This is called equilibrium.
Democrats and liberals are held to impossible standards and judged by equally ludicrous standards. As Lapdogs was being rushed through the presses, the recent re-examination into the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, not yet an official contender for the party's presidential nomination in '08, became a classic example of what's considered "newsworthy" and what's considered tabloid.
The list of revelations can be endless and if you care about the quality of the news that you read and see, you, too, will be forced to make some sobering judgments on how the news is being strained and filtered down to you.
And even though Boehlert doesn't delve into this issue, I closed Lapdogs while asking myself, "Does the press truly represent the American people and should it?" In my opinion, yes. The press should be, as Helen Thomas says in the title of her own new book, the watchdogs of democracy. A free and honest press, as it says early in the book, is absolutely vital in a functional democracy. But now, thanks to progressive-minded bloggers and increasingly vocal news consumers, we as a nation are gradually beginning to realize that we have neither.
The MSM is more interested in access than hard investigation (because, denied access, the journalists of America would actually have to get up off their fat, lazy asses and chase down leads, i.e. actually do their jobs), careers instead of pursuing uncomfortable truths, in coverage instead of actual reportage and the hard-luck losers of this contemptible country-club style of "journalism" are not only the consumers who find themselves getting shut out from virtually every meaningful story but democracy itself. And when the mainstream media, which is compressed into the hands of just five CEOs, many of them defense contractors who depend on GOP favoritism for wartime contracts, continue missing with pinpoint accuracy, you have to fear for the history of which journalism is the first draft.