politics

Craig Crawford Wags the Dog

October 13, 2005

While many critics of the contemporary media claim that reporters all carry within them the unrepentant virus known as “bias,” it’s often difficult to take their arguments — themselves suffused with rabid partisanship — too seriously. While some of these critics raise valid concerns, more seem to exist only to score political points by pointing out what journalists should cover, and how they should cover it. (Invariably, such critiques translate to, “This story doesn’t square with the dearly-held views of myself and my affinity group, so it, not I, must be off-base.”)

Now into this fray wades Craig Crawford. A columnist for Congressional Quarterly, Crawford has just published Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn you Against the Media, a book in which he defends journalism as being the foundation on which a healthy democracy rests, while laying the blame for accusations of bias primarily on politicians trying to deflect attention from their own problems.

The book is solidly reported, but Crawford appears to fundamentally confuse the role of the punditocracy with the role of politicians and political operatives — a mistake that taints his argument as a whole. It’s his contention that politicians have been out in front in turning Americans against the press, and that they have been aided in this by partisan pundits in the opinion news business, who have picked up on the griping of politicians.

We think he has it backwards.

In reality, the bias warriors who create the “blame media first” narrative are most often in the media — avidly partisan pundits who turn on precisely those reporters who are not in the opinion racket. That narrative is then seized on by politicians in order to deflect attention away from their own problems.

Crawford does acknowledge that “pseudojournalists and well-funded advocacy groups … are in place as alternatives to the traditional media,” and that “the rise of this propaganda machine feeds on the belief that the news media is biased. Yet often there is no one more biased than those who hurl the charge.”

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But his primary thesis — that “Politicians have so successfully persuaded Americans that reporters merely traffic their own biases that they need only make the charge and most people believe it” — ignores the partisan hackery on the part of one columnist, or blogger, or cable anchor, that so often gives cover to political attacks on the press.

Crawford uses examples from both the Clinton and the Bush presidencies to bolster his case — but without the partisan media itself shilling for these politicians, the pols wouldn’t have so easily succeeded in saddling the media with the stigma of bias. Consider Tom DeLay’s recent charge that the scandals that have followed him these past months are “just another seedy attempt by the liberal media to embarrass me.” Where do you think he got that? Without years of conservative pundits hammering home the idea that the press is carrying out a liberal agenda, the charge likely wouldn’t have even surfaced.

In other words, a Limbaugh creates the argument, and a DeLay comes along to exploit it.

Which brings us to another failing in Crawford’s epistle. He never defines his terms in a way that would allow the reader to distinguish just which politicians are most adept at playing the bias game. Truth be told — and Crawford undoubtedly knows this full well — it is primarily conservative politicians who wield the media bias cudgel, though he seems loathe to ever admit as much.

Because of this hesitancy — and because of Crawford’s confusion about the intellectual food chain that generates charges of media bias — a well-researched book ends up resting on a distinctly wobbly premise.

–Paul McLeary

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.