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The Don't Quote Me archive.
FOUR YEARS AGO, Donald Barlett and James Steele's populist manifesto America: What Went Wrong? became something of a phenomenon. The book, an outgrowth of their 1991 series for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a bestselling exposé of how the Reagan Administration and Congress had screwed the working class on everything from taxes to job security. It was the subject of a PBS series hosted by Bill Moyers. It was lauded by then-candidate Bill Clinton as "must reading for any student of politics, ethics, or business." It may even have played a role in building support for the tax hike on the rich that squeaked through Congress in 1993. Shouted down
A clarion cry of economic trouble is muffled by the Man
by Dan Kennedy
This time, the empire struck back. When Barlett and Steele's 10-part, 65,000-word follow-up, America: Who Stole the Dream?, debuted in the Inquirer on September 8, the critics were ready. Barlett and Steele fingered free-trade agreements such as NAFTA and GATT, as well as uncontrolled immigration, as important reasons for the disappearance of the millions of manufacturing jobs that had once sustained the working class. The series, built upon reams of statistics, was backed up with the tales of ordinary Americans who'd lost their jobs when their companies shut down US operations and opened new plants in low-wage, Third World countries. Who Stole the Dream? was an attack on economic orthodoxy and on the pro-free-trade consensus that prevails among both political parties in Washington, and it did not go unanswered.
"A twisted portrait of the economy," thundered Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post and Newsweek. "Their anecdotes are interesting; their attempts at context are hilarious," sneered Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal. The Seattle Times killed the series after the first installment; executive editor Michael Fancher called its premise "sweeping and provocative" but "unsubstantiated." And Christopher Caldwell, of the conservative Weekly Standard, charged that the series was little more than a sloppily conceived attempt by the Inquirer's Pulitzer-starved editors to use their marquee performers (the Barlett-and-Steele team has two Pulitzers to its credit) to bring home some much-needed gold.
You wouldn't think Barlett and Steele's work could be dismissed so easily. After all, only 10 months ago Pat Buchanan's pitchfork peasants were storming New Hampshire, capitalizing on middle- and working-class angst with a crude but powerful anti-immigration, anti-free-trade message. The New York Times published a landmark series on economic insecurity under the direction of managing editor Gene Roberts, the former Philadelphia Inquirer editor who first brought Barlett and Steele to prominence. (Samuelson, for one, didn't like the Times series, either.) And Newsweek weighed in with a post-office-style rogues' gallery of downsizing-obsessed corporate executives.
Certainly there's plenty of evidence of a crisis in working-class America. Inflation-adjusted wages, especially for people with no more than a high-school education, have been dropping since the early 1970s. The gap between rich and poor has been widening since the rise of Reaganomics, as Samuelson himself has acknowledged on other occasions. But with unemployment and inflation low, and with the media providing the drumbeat for Clinton's re-election claim that the economy was humming thanks to him, economic insecurity had diminished as a political issue by the time Barlett and Steele were ready with their opus.
Thus, unlike its predecessor, Who Stole the Dream? disappeared without a trace. Steele, in a Phoenix interview, says he's still hopeful that his work will have some effect: the book version (Andrews & McMeel, $9.95) is hitting bookstores now, he notes, and some 40 newspapers across the country ran all or part of the series. "America: What Went Wrong? was kind of in a class by itself," concedes Steele. "But this one has had -- and continues to have -- quite an impact in the markets where it's run."
Trouble is, unless a story gets repeated over and over in the New York-Washington media axis, the usual fate is for it to be quickly forgotten. Damaging as the criticism from Samuelson, Jenkins, and Caldwell may have been, silence -- the lack of attention from the network news programs, the talking-heads shows, and the like -- can be devastating.
"There's no echo chamber for this kind of reporting," says Jeff Cohen, executive director of the liberal media-watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "There's no echo chamber for saying that hey, big business is ripping off the country. And part of the reason for that is that big business owns the echo chamber." Or, as Barlett himself put it in a recent interview on FAIR's nationally syndicated radio show, CounterSpin: "Some editors are very uncomfortable with anything that challenges the status quo." (CounterSpin can be heard on the World-Wide Web in RealAudio at http://www.fair.org/fair/counterspin.)
Where alternative channels of communication exist, it is possible to force the mainstream to take notice. For instance, last summer the San Jose Mercury News published a controversial series, Dark Alliance, on an alleged connection between the CIA and the introduction of crack in Los Angeles. The basic elements of the story struck such a powerful chord in the black community that it spread nationwide via black-oriented talk shows and newspapers, forcing both the media and government officials to investigate.
Unfortunately, there's no grassroots network akin to the black media to keep a story like Who Stole the Dream? alive. There is, though, a technology that didn't even exist when What Went Wrong? was on the bestseller list: the World-Wide Web. It was the Web, after all, that transformed Dark Alliance from a series in a regional paper into an ongoing story available to black media outlets across the country. (The series can be found at http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs.) The Philadelphia Inquirer has published an abbreviated version of Who Stole the Dream? on its Web site (http://www.phillynews.com/packages/america96). That may give the story some long-term legs even if the book version fails to catch on.
Al Gore may have beaten Ross Perot in the great NAFTA debate on Larry King Live!, but neither he nor anyone else has explained how American workers can compete against low-paid workers in countries with scant environmental and workplace-safety regulations.
The reason they haven't, as Barlett and Steele make clear, is that they can't.
It was supposed to be a nice, comfortable environment for John McLaughlin, the machine-gun-mouthed conservative host of The McLaughlin Group. But no sooner had he opened it up for questions at a recent breakfast at WGBH-TV (Channel 2) when he was whacked by a member of the audience. The interlocutor said he was troubled by criticism of McLaughlin's role in fostering a new class of TV pundits, such as Cokie Roberts, George Will, and McLaughlin himself, who parlay their fame into lucrative lectures before corporate gatherings.
"I don't take them seriously," McLaughlin said of his critics, clearly agitated. And he went after his chief tormentor -- James Fallows, author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, and the new editor of U.S. News & World Report -- with particular vigor, noting that Fallows had been on The McLaughlin Group several times during its early years. "He asked me how he could improve his performance: `Should I interject without being called upon? Should I use bolder language?' But I see now that he's taken a different view of the program," McLaughlin smirked.
McLaughlin never did get around to answering the questioner about lecture fees, so I pressed him on it after the morning's program. He responded with a combination of humor and bluster. "I think they're wonderful. I think it's white-collar crime," he said, making it clear that this was one type of criminal behavior he heartily supported. He then denied that speaking fees have a corrupting influence on a journalist's opinions, claiming, not too convincingly, that he and his fellow lecture-circuit pundits "can't even remember who we talk to. It all becomes a blur."
Presumably there was no speaking fee for his appearance at Channel 2: The McLaughlin Group recently switched from WBZ-TV (Channel 4) back to its old PBS home, and the event was designed as a mutual stroking session.
Nevertheless, the issue of corporate influence was front and center. McLaughlin's show, after all, is sponsored by General Electric, the giant military contractor and nuclear-power-plant manufacturer. And McLaughlin was introduced by a GE official.
Given his oft-stated disdain for the media elite, Rush Limbaugh's fixation on establishment acceptance is odd, to say the least. He regularly rails against criticism of his show, and he's reported to fly into rages at the wickedly vicious parodies of him that are broadcast on Imus in the Morning. Why does he care?
Now the rotund right-winger has taken to quoting from the executive summary of a report by UPenn's Annenberg Public Policy Center as if it were a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Rush's favorite passage: "Limbaugh's focus differs substantially from that of the other shows. His topics are more likely to focus on domestic politics and business. In addition, Limbaugh spends more time than other hosts urging his audience to assume personal responsibility and insisting they can make a difference."
What Rush doesn't tell you, though, is that the report also found that his show focuses on foreign affairs far less than other conservative shows do, and on family and education far less than moderate or liberal shows. The report even found that many of Limbaugh's listeners agree with the host's off-the-wall belief that the media have treated the Unabomber more kindly than the Oklahoma City bombers. (The report summary can be found on the Web at http://www.asc.upenn.edu/appc/trp/trp.html.)
Co-author Kathleen Hall Jamieson declined to comment on Limbaugh's using her work to boost his own credibility, explaining that the full study has not yet been completed.
Suffice to say, though, that the conclusions are more mixed than Rush has let on.
The Don't Quote Me archive.
Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.