The Right Should Try Journalism

By Richard Brookhiser

Does the right know anything about First Amendment rights? Does it have any of its own? The experts of moment on these questions should be the management and staff of WTTG-TV, Washington's Channel 5, the Fox network station in town.

Last month Joe Robinowitz, the news director, was composing a memo to the chairman of Fox Television in Los Angeles on the prospective replacement of employees who were "inept," "shallow" or "politically correct." In preparation for this task, he wrote, he had been consulting with conservative media critics, including L. Brent Bozell III, chairman of the Media Research Center, and Reed Irvine, head of Accuracy in Media. Singling out ineptitude and shallowness presumably would not have raised eyebrows, but hunting down political correctness in the company of Messrs. Bozell and Irvine was distinctly incorrect. Alas for Robinowitz, he left his thoughts on the office computer system (in a file named "Fugitive Slayings"). From there, it was but a step to the capital's nonelectronic bulletin board, the Style section of the Washington Post, where staffers described themselves as "stunned" and "demoralized," and Robinowitz climbed down so fast he scorched his pants. "I was having a bad-hair day," he explained to the Post, "and I'm totally bald."

This little tale tells us a good deal about the way journalists live now. It reminds us yet again of the death of the press lords -- the Hearsts, the Luces, the Lord Copper of Evelyn Waugh's barely fictional Fleet Street -- men who knew their own opinions and imposed them on the media they ran. Rupert Murdoch, buccaneer owner of Fox and much else of the world's communications business, seemed to be a throwback to those spacious days (spacious for owners). But even his empire is so segmented and authority in it so delegated that the people who run its component parts have to call in outsiders to tell them what they don't like, and they are embarrassed when their dislikes are discovered. The only thing the money men really control these days is the money.

Into the vacuum left by the retreating clout of the owner has flowed the pretensions of the journalistic class. This is a relatively new thing in American journalism, because only in the past half-century have journalists had anything to be pretentious about. Some of the great names of American writing cut their teeth in the press -- Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway. But until well into this century, most reporters fit the Duke of Wellington's description of the English soldier -- "the scum of the earth." They were lively but ignorant, and often venal. The spread of college education affected even them, however, until by now all journalists know something, though perhaps less than everything. With skills came pride. Journalists no longer submit to having their take on reality circumscribed by the people who happen to sign their paychecks.

In throwing off the eccentricities of owners, has journalism given itself to the mind-set of a new class? Is the sum of all journalists' takes on reality only the same take, endlessly repeated? And is that take liberal? Republican pols from Spiro Agnew to George (ANNOY THE MEDIA) Bush have said so and have drawn on the work of students of the media -- some of them unbiased -- for ammunition. As far back as the Depression, Leo Rosten found, most newspaper reporters were Democrats, even though most newspapers of the day were officially Republican.

Conservatives have tried several strategies to fight the voices they see ranged against them. From time to time they hatch schemes to buy a major newspaper or a network and run it right. Even if such an ideological annexation were to succeed, however, the new owners would still have to confront the culture of journalism. Since the pool of potential editors and reporters would be the same, so, presumably, would their product. A better strategy has been that of Bozell and Irvine: nitpicking the media to death. Every time an anchorperson casts goo-goo eyes at the Clintons or disses the memory of Ronald Reagan, their newsletters record the deed. Sometimes an editor will give their complaints a hearing, as A.M. Rosenthal did when he was managing editor of the New York Times. But such exercises mostly serve to set the record straight, and to please the subscribers of the newsletters.

The only way for conservatives to alter the complexion of the press in the long run is to get into journalism themselves: not as owners, nor as advisers to owners, as in the WTTG-TV affair, but as working journalists. If enough conservatives take up the craft, and do the job well enough, then -- and only then -- will variety in the media extend beyond shouting heads on The McLaughlin Group. This raises the deep question of whether the activity of journalism is itself incongenial to the conservative temper. Liberals like to think of conservatives as uncritical and incurious. Conservatives like to think of themselves as wiser about, hence happier with, life. Neither frame of mind seems suited to ripping the masks off private and public pretense.

The lure of journalism for right-wingers must be that certain liberal doctrines and policies have been established for so long that they are ripe for muckraking. Theorists have been assailing the effects of the welfare state for a decade. Where are its $300 toilet seats? Affirmative action has been the law of the land since the Nixon Administration. Who are the victims it has hurt?

If liberal journalists don't ask such questions, it's no good firing them. We'll just have to ask them ourselves.