The Weekly Screed (#726)

The prebuttal imperative
of the “liberal media”
by David Benjamin

PARIS — I thought I’d coined the word “prebuttal” until today when, in the New York Times, I found Paul Vallely using it in an op-ed piece about Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical, Laudato Sii. Vallely was citing a preemptive denunciation by GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, issued before the Vatican had officially released the Pope’s historic message.

My own definition of “prebuttal” applies to news outfits, particularly the Times, accused so often by right-wing propagandists of “liberal bias” that they’re gun-shy. “Pre-actively,” in any political story that pits liberals vs. conservatives, Establishment news organizations rush to articulate the right-wing position.

The eternal irony is that the Right never credits mainstream journalism for this premonitory obeisance. Jugular conservatives like radio clown Rush Limbaugh thrive on and profit from the myth of the “liberal media.” It would be right-wing heresy and ratings suicide to praise fair minds for their fairness.

This tortuous balancing act doesn’t only reduce the editorial space (or air-time) available for liberal views. It squeezes out facts. It pushes down — into the deep unread portion of the story — that useful information that serves to help the unbiased, the curious and the ignorant to decide which argument is more cogent.

I’ve been reading newspapers since I could read. Lately, I’ve gotten the sense that proud old broadsheets like the Times and the Washington Post are tailoring coverage in hopes of getting the right-wing noise machine out of their ear. My latest example is a Times piece last month by Coral Davenport. It covered President Obama’s pending executive order to extend the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act jurisdiction to vulnerable water sources, including lakes and streams previously unprotected by the law.

This sensible idea received a preemptive razzberry from the corporate and agribusiness interests who’ve been poisoning lakes and streams for a century. Their well-known promise about the filth that they spew into our rivers, wells and water tables is that we should “trust” them to voluntarily carry out the sort of environmental stewardship they’ve never previously cared about.

(Don’t Tread On Me. You might squeeze out something disgusting.)

The Times anticipated this right-wing outcry. The Times knew it would be trashed by “Fox and Friends” as Obama’s personal Pravda, just for reporting the plan, plainly and objectively. Indeed, of the 1,071 words in Davenport’s story, 450 provided readers a plain, objective — somewhat hasty — explanation.

Davenport could have explained more, including why the EPA believes more rules are necessary. But she had a prebuttal to write. She pumped out and quoted 463 words dedicated to the rich and powerful — in the form of vows by Republicans, corporate spokespeople and pathological polluters to kill this Obama-spawned regulatory monster while it’s still in the womb.

“Environmentalists” and the EPA got 158 words from the liberal Times — roughly one for every three words given to their pro-pollution opponents.

I found a similar imbalance in Charlie Savage’s Times story about last week’s King v. Burwell Supreme Court bombshell, which upheld the Affordable Care Act. The Court’s vote was 6-3, suggesting that the Times reporter should afford the winning (liberal) side twice as much space as the defeated minority.

Au contraire. In his quote-heavy analysis, Savage gave pro-Obamacare justices 558 words. On the other (losing) hand, the flamboyantly reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia, all by himself, commanded 602 apoplectic words.

Next day, the Court’s marriage-equality ruling was an even bigger triumph for liberals. True to prebuttal protocol, the Washington Post gave the victors 99 words in ‘graphs 3 and 4, including a snippet from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. The conservative losers got twice the ink — 184 words — covering ‘graphs 5-9, with an extended comment by Chief Roberts and an Apocalyptic dig from Scalia.

Based on these examples, this prebuttal thing seems to me like an actual trend. But I always prefer a little more evidence. To test my intuition, I went looking for a story where the good guys got licked. I wanted to see if the Times — worried about accusations of “conservative bias” — might skew its coverage toward the laments of the defeated Left.

The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission seemed like the ideal control. The story was by Adam Liptak, the Times’ crack legal correspondent. It was heavy on straightforward, apolitical explanation. Liptak devoted 401 of an 875-word report to background, as well as the implications and the dramatis personae in the futile struggle to keep organized money from trampling the American electorate into a state of feckless feudalism.

In the remainder of Liptak’s story, the winning — conservative — side got 279 words of coverage and quotation. Most important, conservative justices claimed the “top” of the story. The liberals, whose arguments slipped to ‘graphs 5, 12, 15, 21 and 23, got the loser’s appropriate share of attention — 195 words.

Every case I’ve examined renders a similar outcome. In the liberal media, when liberals lose, they lose. And when they win, they also lose.

“Prebuttal” — routinely granting precedence to the utterances of plutocrats, hired guns, blowhards and zealots who can’t even imagine returning the favor — has become, I suppose, a sort of survival tactic among America’s few remaining bastions of professional journalism.

I’m just thinking that a motto-edit is probably advisable. The little box beside the banner has always read: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” But that old saw dates back to bygone bygones, when the Times ruled the media and called the shots. Today, revised subtly for editorial accuracy and media realities, the motto in the box would look the same and you’d have to peek close to notice the change:

“All That Fox News Thinks Fit to Print.”