[Marxism] More on George Mason's rightwing tgies

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nybooks.com/contents/20060209
To the Editors:

In his article ["The End of News?" NYR, December 1, 2005] Michael Massing 
places me in the company of Spiro Agnew and Reed Irvine as right-wing media 
bashers. He also describes the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) 
as "a research institute that, while presenting itself as nonpartisan, 
sought to document instances of liberal [media] bias" as part of a 
Republican war against the press. As evidence he notes that we released a 
survey showing that national media journalists are mainly socially liberal 
Democrats, and that we received grants from the conservative Olin and 
Scaife foundations.

This evidence is true but highly incomplete. For example, our findings on 
journalists' attitudes have been echoed by surveys conducted by such 
organizations as Gannett, the Los Angeles Times, and the Pew Foundation. 
Does anyone still doubt the validity of this portrait? Further, our studies 
of news content have challenged conservative media criticism on such 
hot-button topics as abortion, affirmative action, and political 
partisanship. In fact, our report that Bill Clinton got much worse press 
than George H.W. Bush?before the so-called Clinton scandals?garnered 
widespread publicity.

Similarly, CMPA has been supported by Scaife and Olin, but also by the 
Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew 
Charitable Trusts, and National Council of La Raza. Our work has been 
praised publicly by Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Kathleen Kennedy 
Townsend, and the late Paul Wellstone. And our findings have been cited 
favorably in The Nation, the Utne Reader, and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Thus, our studies produce results that sometimes please conservatives and 
other times please liberals. But they derive from recognized social 
scientific methods and are vetted by the academic peer review process. Our 
research has been published in numerous scholarly journals that run the 
gamut from the American Political Science Review and the Harvard 
International Journal of Press/Politics to Nature and the Journal of the 
American Medical Association, as well as by the Yale and Oxford university 
presses.

This is not to say that our work is beyond criticism, but that it deserves 
to be evaluated on its merits and not dismissed because its findings are 
sometimes ideologically inconvenient. Besides, why would a right-wing 
media-bashing outfit give its press criticism award to Michael Massing for 
his Nation article debunking Judith Miller's credulous reporting on the 
threat posed by WMDs?

S. Robert Lichter
President
Center for Media and Public Affairs
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia


Michael Massing replies:


In my article, I described how the Center for Media and Public Affairs was 
set up with conservative foundation money in the mid-1980s as part of a 
growing effort by the right to portray the American press as liberal and 
out of touch with mainstream America. In a phone conversation, Robert 
Lichter acknowledged to me that the center's funding in its initial years 
came almost entirely from conservative sources, with Olin and Smith 
Richardson in the lead. Beginning in 1991, the center became a regular 
beneficiary of two foundations controlled by the very conservative Scaife 
family. According to mediatransparency.org, CMPA since 1986 has received 
$1,172,000 from Scaife, $730,000 from Olin, and $417,000 from Smith 
Richardson. The other institutions Lichter cites became supporters much 
later, and their contributions have been dwarfed by those from these highly 
conservative groups. It's also worth noting that, at the time Lichter was 
setting up CMPA, he was a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise 
Institute.

Furthermore, a survey of the articles that Lichter wrote in the period 
under discussion shows that they were overwhelmingly--indeed, almost 
exclusively--conservative in orientation. In contributions to The Wall 
Street Journal's editorial pages, for instance, Lichter condemned the press 
for writing too negatively about nuclear energy, too favorably about Anita 
Hill (a reflection of "the growing influence of feminists at major media 
outlets"), too critically about Dan Quayle, and too much about the homeless 
(a "blueprint of advocacy journalism").

In a column attacking the Columbia Journalism Review for being an "advocate 
of advocacy media," Lichter wrote that "without espousing an overt 
ideological mission, any work of criticism can unconsciously reflect an 
ideological perspective. This can be reflected in the choice of subject 
matter, the focus of investigation or the types of criticism leveled." His 
"main finding," Lichter added, "is not that CJR's criticisms are incorrect 
but that they are one-sided." This would seem to apply to Lichter's own 
organization. For many years, the only bias it ever found in the press was 
of a liberal variety. As Lichter told me, at one point he became 
uncomfortable with CMPA's highly conservative image and so began working to 
appear more evenhanded. Whether he has succeeded or not would take another 
article to assess, but my account of the origins of his organization stands.

--

www.marxmail.org


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