“THE COUNTRY’S GOING TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET. I BLAME THE MEDIA-BLAMERS” (“King of the Hill,” last night): A column on the New Republic’s site blames the Democrats’ election losses on the GOP’s big bucks and control of the media (=talk radio and FoxNews). Democrats are cast as Sen. Jefferson Smith of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” fame–they’re standing there valiantly telling the truth, but no one in their home states can hear them because the Syndicate controls the means of news-production! Some thoughts:

1) Why do people like FoxNews? I mean, it’s not like political ads, which assault you televisually even if you’d prefer not to see them. In order to hear Rush Limbaugh, or see Brit Hume’s baggy bulldog face, you have to choose the right-wing wackos over the TNR-approved voices on National Public Radio or CNN or CBS or ABC or NBC or PBS or… etc. So “the Right controls the media!” isn’t really an explanation, is it? You still have to explain why people tune in.

2) Campaign finance reform. If a relatively loophole-free version could be both devised and passed (which almost certainly won’t happen, but whatever), it would make the major media organizations proportionally more powerful, since they will be among the few unfettered, unrestricted political voices. When ads become less important, op-eds and talking heads fill the vacuum, becoming more important. If the media is biased against the left and/or the Democrats and/or your favorite candidates or positions, isn’t this a bad thing? Now, it may be that the GOP has a “structural advantage” in both advertising and media (I think this is bogus, but hey, it could happen), and if the advertising advantage is bigger, then CFR might be politically fruitful for the Democrats despite the GOP media advantage. But it’d be worthwhile to see more pro-CFR people acknowledging the extra weight their proposal would give to major media. (Public funding of campaigns also falls prey to this problem–or “feature” if you want the major media to have more sway!–and has other defects I don’t want to tussle about right now.)

3) I know the New York Times is not typical. (Just stereotypical, which is different.) But I wanted to comment on this post from Charles Murtaugh, because I think he makes a good point but it’s not quite the point he seems to make. I’m going to quote the whole post, sans permalinks: The varieties of religious experience.

Here’s an interesting study in contrasts: yesterday’s New York Times ran an article, “Bishops Pass Plan to Form Tribunals in Sex Abuse Cases”, with quotes from two Church critics, and another article, “Bishops Fail to Heed Calls for an Audit”, quoting another critic of Church policy.

So how many Church critics were quoted in the yesterday’s Times article entitled “War on Iraq Not Yet Justified, Bishops Say”? How about in all of the articles pulled out of the Times by LEXIS-NEXIS, using the search terms “catholic, bishops, death penalty”? Care to guess? Go ahead and do the search yourself. Then try “catholic, bishops, abortion” and see how that works out.

Now, on the face of it this doesn’t seem like a good point. After all, if you compare the three stories Murtaugh links, the two in which Church critics are cited are actually in-depth stories reported by the NYT itself about breaking news, whereas the non-Church-critical Iraq story is a quickie Associated Press clip that’s basically a reprinted press release from the bishops’ conference. Thus the stories that quote Church critics are: more inherently newsy, better-reported in general, and reported by a different media organization. The real journalistic crime in the Iraq story is that the AP was essentially reprinting a press release, an uber-annoying journalistic shortcut.

But as soon as the real problem has been identified, it becomes clear, I think, that Professor Murtaugh is right: When would the Times puff a bishops’ conference press release on abortion? I would argue that it shouldn’t puff any such press releases, but as long as we’re talking about Who Controls The Media, Murtaugh’s post is a data point suggesting that either a) the TNR piece is wrong, or b) the NYT is a lot less important than it thinks it is.