PHOENIX WRITER Dan Kennedy says, "Liberal media bias? You’ve got to be kidding" (see "Don't Quote Me," News and Features, March 14). E.J. Dionne sees only "the rightward press" (see his Washington Post column from December 6, 2002). And Eric Alterman asks, "What liberal media?" in his new book from Basic Books (What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News). These and other observers of the media insist that "liberal media bias" is a canard, a deliberate falsification by conservatives to whomp the media into acceding to the goals of the conservative right. Some apologists for the liberal media — folks like the Nation’s Alterman and the zealots who churn out the screeds on TomPaine.com — thunder that the media are corporate tools who grovel at the altar of capitalism and worship President George W. Bush’s agenda. The fact that Editor & Publisher, a prime "bible" of the industry, reports in a recent survey that two-thirds of the country’s newspapers opposed Bush on Iraq (I borrow this from Ken Grubbs’s American Spectator piece, March/April 2003) seems not to have registered with those instructing us that the media don’t lean left, even though any study of newspaper writers and editorial policies shows a decisively leftward tilt of years’ duration. Of major newspapers, only the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is conservative.

As lawyers say, we may safely stipulate that an overwhelming majority of journalists acknowledge that they vote Democratic (or sometimes Green); that the bulk of newspapers stand to the center-left on the cultural scales; that some, although not all, skew their stories to buttress their ideological stances — hello, New York Times — as do the morning TV talk hosts (if not all as obviously as the unlamented Bryant Gumbel, who once declared of his prime-time special The Racial Attitudes and Consciousness Exam (RACE), "This test is not going to tell you whether you’re a racist or a liberal" — as though these were the only alternatives); and that journalism is the province of people who rarely confess to being conservative or libertarian. (Anyone yearning for a weekly dose of the liberal media elite’s broadcast and print opinings ought to log onto www.mediaresearchcenter.org. Either you’ll keel over laughing, or you’ll grind your teeth into nubs.)

You can grasp all this and yet not quite get to the heart of the matter: neither the economy nor foreign policy, in general, frames our society’s fault lines. Except for those on the far left, Americans don’t buy socialist or communist economic theories. That corporations, labor unions, and Americans in general happily accept the premises and conclusions of our economic system says nothing interesting about conservatism or liberalism. Instead, culture divides us. Or rather, cultural indicators do.

The evidence is everywhere. The current crisis surrounding Jayson Blair’s plagiarism and fraudulent reporting at the New York Times says a tad about the perils of active retribution ("affirmative action" is the term liberals prefer), but more about the pervasive attitude of the flagship of American daily journalism. Even liberals acknowledge that the Times has moved left on cultural issues and that under its just-jettisoned executive editor, Howell Raines, who writhes with incurable white guilt, it has become almost hysterically besotted by things like the expected (and, one cannot help but think, the desired) failure (this in advance of the war) of the Iraq war, the unimaginably nasty (to them) fact that a snazzy golf club doesn’t desire women members, and assorted effluvia. Surveys by the barrelful indicate that Americans are certain that their newspapers and TV evening-news shows lean left. If the Blair case exemplifies anything other than the manifest incapacity of the people at the helm to get their priorities right, it indicates that a central liberal shibboleth, "diversity," holds sway. Given the Times’ publisher’s and former executive editor’s explicit acknowledgment that they value "diversity" and minority hiring as paramount goals, it’s little wonder the Times papered over the manifold errors, lies, distortions, fabrications, and clearly evidenced cocaine habit of Raines’s darling.

Speech codes, hiring quotas, and PC (political cockamamie) in all its repulsive smugness are not just alive, they dominate the major media outlets. The Los Angeles Times recently acknowledged ongoing liberal bias (a leaked memo from editor John Carroll, posted on Kevin Roderick’s L.A. Observed Web site, noted the perception that "the Times is a liberal, ‘politically correct’ newspaper," adding that "occasionally we prove our critics right"). The Minneapolis Star Tribune is suffering fits about whether to allow common, but politically incorrect, names of sports teams (such as "Skins" for the Washington Redskins) to be mentioned in its august pages, and away we go. Find a conservative who would apotheosize "diversity" on grounds of color or sex or ethnicity or sexual orientation over merit and competence, and you’re as likely to find a hen’s tooth right beside him.

The point is made monotonously that the Fox News Channel skews rightward, and it does. But rarely is it noted that the FNC’s tiny audience and the even tinier audience for MSNBC — now yearning to outfox Fox by showcasing often absurdly benighted right-wing hosts — pale in size when compared to audiences for the major networks, whose anchors routinely cast their stories in ways that not so subtly favor the liberal interpretation of things. (Dan Rather was even the star attraction at a 2001 fundraiser, hosted by his daughter, for the Travis County Democratic Party in Austin, Texas; other anchors may not show their colors so blatantly.) And National Public Radio, which is almost religiously left of center in the bulk of its programming, hosts, and favored guests, has become one of America’s primary venues for Israel-bashing. Israel is problematic for liberals, who were once its strongest champions. Since liberals think supposedly "downtrodden" groups are justified in their actions, Israel now acts as a litmus test of the liberal-conservative chasm. This state of affairs marks an amazing 180-degree turn; until recently the right was neither philo-Semitic nor staunchly pro-Israel, and now it is. Meanwhile, the left has turned tail, fawningly adoring the new Holocaust-denier prime minister of the Palestine Authority and taking a tearful stance toward the presumed plight of the Palestinians — whose situation, though NPR and such cannot bear to say it, is the fault of Yasser Arafat’s gang.

The left is lost to the damned on this topic, and liberals are in a quandary. Conservatives stand unabashedly with the survival of the Jewish state, while liberals keep propounding the blurry theory of a two-state "solution," which they actually believe will come to pass even as the overwhelming majority of Arabs, including those we refer to as Palestinians, want Israel dead and Jews everywhere annihilated. Yes, President Bush says he favors his hallucinatory "road map" — roadblock is more like it — but who truly shares his belief?

Talk radio is often cited as evidence that the media skew rightward. Permit a reality check, if you will. According to the latest Arbitrends, the three-month survey of metropolitan Boston’s radio-listening habits (encompassing February, March, and April 2003), the three local stations that matter in non-sports talk programming (WBZ, WTKK, and WRKO) accounted for 17.8 percent of all those ages 12 and over who listen to radio during the whole week. From 7 p.m. to midnight, the only time period when those three stations broadcast talk programs (all of which lean rightward, except for the 10-to-midnight show on ’BZ), only 17 percent of the radio audience tunes in to talk programs. The rest listen to music and sports, and yes, sports-talk-show hosts sometimes display a brand of gruff, blustery unpleasantness. DJs on music radio are rarely permitted to express opinions, but when they do, instead of lauding the Christian right, they far more often unburden themselves of their liberal, and often libertine, points of view. The most famous DJ, the Ur-shock-talk host Howard Stern, propounds an ideology of sexual grossness that is almost a parody of liberal insensitivity and is anathema to those who are ideologically right-of-center. His emulators, like the now (temporarily) unemployed Opie and Anthony, regard obnoxious stunts like broadcasting a chap detailing coitus in the cathedral during a key Christian holiday as riotous. Sexual high jinks have become a central part of radio vulgarity. Far more people listen to this sort of thing than are besotted by the small segment of right-wing radio talk shows.

This data on the percentage of local radio listeners who tune in regularly to talk shows is replicated nationally. And radio listeners amount to — what tiny percentage of Americans? We who host talk radio shows at night are grateful for our audiences, but far more people are watching TV or listening to non-talk radio shows. So the evidence hardly points to a vast right-wing radio conspiracy. No, Virginia, neither Fox nor Rush Limbaugh owns America. The well-funded, high-salary-paying, beg-instead-of-advertise NPR affiliates are undeniably liberal and do well in many markets. WBUR has significant clout among the wine-and-cheese cohort for whom only "public" radio is listenable, only the Boston Globe and the New York Times are to be read, and only WGBH-TV and such are to be watched — never, God forbid, something that hoi polloi might view on non-public stations, listen to on radio stations that advertise, or read in tabloid-size dailies along with their morning coffee at Dunkin' Donuts.