A New Silent Majority

By Mark Buchanan

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.

In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken “an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president,” and portrayed Carter’s words — unfairly it seems — as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it “unprecedented.” Yet as an article in this newspaper on Tuesday pointed out, “presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones.”

The pattern is familiar. Polls show that most Americans want our government to stop its unilateral swaggering, and to try to solve our differences with other nations through diplomacy. In early April, for example, when the speaker of the House, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, a poll had 64 percent of Americans in favor of negotiations with the Syrians. Yet this didn’t stop an outpouring of media alarm.

A number of CNN broadcasts — including one showing Pelosi with a head scarf beside the title “Talking with Terrorists?” — failed even to mention that several Republican congressmen had met with Assad two days before Pelosi did. The conventional wisdom on the principal television talk shows was that Pelosi had “messed up on this one” (in the words of NBC’s Matt Lauer), and that she and the Democrats would pay dearly for it.

So it must have been a great surprise when Pelosi’s approval ratings stayed basically the same after her visit, or actually went up a little.

Or take the matter of the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Most media figures seem to consider the very idea as issuing from the unhinged imaginations of a lunatic fringe. But according to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans in fact support it, including 42 percent of independents.

A common explanation of this tendency toward distortion is that the beltway media has attended a few too many White House Correspondents’ Dinners and so cannot possibly cover the administration with anything approaching objectivity. No doubt the Republicans’ notoriously well-organized efforts in casting the media as having a “liberal bias” also have their intended effect in suppressing criticism.

But I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn’t meet with enough criticism, and if that’s partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think – when actually it often doesn’t....2nd half on NY Times but you need a online subscription to view it.........sorry