The cover story of the New York Times Magazine this weekend is either called “The End of Republican America?” or “A Case of the Blues,” depending on whether you look at the cover (whence the image below right comes) or the online version. The author, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, spent some time with NRCC chairman Tom Cole and catalogues the myriad, perhaps insuperable, challenges facing the House GOP as it tries not simply to win back seats lost in 2006, but stave off yet more losses this cycle.
It’s certainly a legitimate article, if not exactly a groundbreaking one, and I have no particular complaints about it. But I did find myself wondering: Couldn’t they have found a reporter from a conservative background to write this story?
In his day job, Wallace-Wells writes for Rolling Stone (as Ben, actually) where the tone of coverage is anything but sympathetic to Republicans. Before that he wrote for the left-leaning Washington Monthly.
So, to answer the question above: Yes, they probably could have. Not that anyone would expect it. Nor does the Times Magazine have a graduate of National Review writing about the Democrats. That’s Matt Bai, and his previous job was — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not so much — Rolling Stone.
And it’s not just the Times Magazine; there is in fact a dearth of experienced, right-leaning feature reporters who write for mainstream magazines and newspapers. The mastheads of Time and Newsweek are filled with reporters who graduated from left-aligned publications. The New Republic is another example, but the Washington Monthly may have no rival as a journalist factory. Among the many former staffers who populate the list of Contributing Editors, here are just the ones I know currently write for major newspapers or magazines:
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Jonathan Alter, Katherine Boo, Matthew Cooper, Michelle Cottle, James Fallows, Joshua Green, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Lemann, Jon Meacham, Timothy Noah, Joseph Nocera, David Segal, Walter Shapiro, Amy Sullivan, Nicholas Thompson, Steven Waldman, Wallace-Wells, Robert Worth
That doesn’t even include Joshua Micah Marshall, who has set up a viable and valuable media company of his own. (Full disclosure: I once wrote an article for the Monthly; Sullivan was my editor and made it a much better piece.)
Conservatives grouse that the writers and editors at the national magazines lean left, and there is definitely some truth to that. Not to a man and woman, and this does not mean their reporting follows the Democratic Party line, but it does have consequences on which stories are covered and how they are covered. But I think the lessons learned are wrong, or at best incomplete.
The reaction is usually to set up an alternative forum which is defined as being explicitly conservative. The problem is that these alternative organizations often operate inside a bubble which their “liberal” counterparts do not. This can be the case beyond journalism as well. On the web we can see this very clearly: The non-partisan but in some ways “liberal” Wikipedia has been answered by the conservative-minded, low-quality Conservapedia.
You could see this in journalism when, last month, new Washington Times editor John Solomon brought the newspaper’s style book closer in line with the standards at every other daily broadsheet in America. Some on the right yelped that this was giving in to the “reigning liberal sensibilities.” But this gets it exactly backwards: instead of “liberal” coming to mean “neutral,” these conservatives are letting “neutral” come to mean “liberal.”
For the record, among the “liberal” sensibilities to which Solomon’s paper succumbed: calling Hillary Clinton “Clinton” rather than the more personal “Hillary” and referring to “illegal immigrants” instead of the antagonistic “illegal aliens.”
The liberal tilt of mainstream newspapers and magazines certainly has something to do with the professional networks within which editors find writers for their stories. But it also has something to do with conservative journalists rarely operating outside their zone of comfort. And especially in magazine articles, they tend to add commentary to existing stories rather than going out and finding new ones.
This is how it works: Liberals get reporting jobs. Conservatives get opinion columns. Look at the Newsweek masthead, liberal Jonathan Alter does indeed have an opinion column, but his full title is Senior Editor and Columnist. George Will is just Columnist. The columnist can make overt arguments the way a reporter cannot, but the columnist’s words are also unmistakably opinions. But decisions that go into how a story is reported are the product of a reporters’ opinions, too. These biases are not always obvious. (And it’s worth noting, there are many other biases besides political outlook in play.)
Conservatives’ railing against the New York Times for being liberal has some salutary effects, and certainly creates some new jobs. A few years ago, Bill Kristol admitted this was “working the refs” (not his phrase). And look: today Kristol himself is a New York Times columnist.
Up to a point, there is a structural bias to the newspaper industry. This can be summed up in three words: “Woodward and Bernstein.” Oftentimes journalists look for something that needs to be fixed by the government. Right-minded individuals, to use an intentionally tendentious phrasing, do not clamor to fix every last societal ill. But then, why doesn’t the right of center dominate investigations into the abuse of government powers? Surely this has a lot to do with Republicans holding a lot of government power for a long time. But then Reason magazine, which is certainly right of center on economic issues, is mostly a lifestyle magazine. It’s Slate for libertarians, with a print edition.
One exception that comes to mind is Byron York. He is not the only reporter at National Review, but he is the only one whose articles include a dateline. His 2005 book “The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” was a detailed look at how the left has set up its own alternative apparatii in response to conservative ones. Nothing against Wallace-Wells, but York too would have been an excellent choice to write a story about the NRCC’s misfortunes.
Which raises a question conservatives should be asking themselves: If the left builds itself a successful activist structure mirroring that of the right (and to a large extent, they already have) while maintaining a soft grip on ostensibly non-aligned political media institutions, what kind of position will the conservative movement be in then?
When one says “conservative journalist,” too often this means “columnist,” not “reporter.” If the right can fix this, they’ve got a chance.
A friend has tipped me to a controversy in the baseball blogosphere — it goes strong 