I Agree With National Review And Noam Chomsky

Kevin O. Williamson of National Review recently critiqued something I posted at Mother Jones about the new "Newseum" in Washington. Interestingly, I largely agree with Williamson. However, I suspect he doesn't know he was largely agreeing with Noam Chomsky.

Here's National Review:

Mother Jones is having a characteristic conniption over a seven-minute video about liberal bias in the media being shown at the Newseum in Washington:

So the message, while shallow, is clear: the media is liberal, and any critique that it may have a corporate or conservative bias is so ridiculous it doesn't even need to be voiced. (Juan Williams says journalists should be careful not to produce a story so it "fits an idea that may have come from you or from your news editor or your managing editor." Intriguingly, the U.S. media seems to have no owners or advertisers.

This is nonsense concentrate. What's interesting, though, is the implicit belief that a "corporate bias" (whatever that may be) is related to, or synonymous with, a "conservative bias"...even sillier is the tired trope, evergreen on the left, that corporations and their executives are particularly conservative, and that Wall Street in particular is a citadel of conservatism. This simply is not the case, as anybody with even a passing familiarity with that world knows. Wall Street barons are, for the most part, rich Manhattan cosmopolitan who have no time for such conservative fixtures as the religious right, the Second Amendment, or, in many cases, free enterprise...

Big Business often adores regulation, because it raises the cost of entry into the market and suffocates scrappy but undercapitalized competitors. You think the steel industry, agribusiness, or banks want an economy that is more free, more capitalist, and more competitive than the one we have? You think Boeing wants a smaller, leaner federal government? Their actions suggest otherwise...

The executive suites may not be quite as uniformly left-Democratic as the editorial offices, but they're not exactly the Provo Chamber of Commerce, either.

And here's Noam Chomsky:

BARSAMIAN: PBS [the Public Broadcasting Service] is sometimes called "the Petroleum Broadcasting Service."

CHOMSKY: That's just another reflection of the interests and power of a highly class-conscious business system that's always fighting an intense class war...

I don't see why we should have had any long-term hopes for something different. Commercially run radio is going to have certain purposes -- namely, the ones determined by people who own and control it.

As I mentioned earlier, they don't want decision-makers and participants; they want a passive, obedient population of consumers and political spectators -- a community of people who are so atomized and isolated that they can't put together their limited resources and become an independent, powerful force that will chip away at concentrated power...

BARSAMIAN: Both PBS and NPR [National Public Radio] frequently come under attack for being left-wing.

CHOMSKY: That's an interesting sort of critique. In fact, PBS and NPR are elite institutions, reflecting by and large the points of view and interests of wealthy professionals who are very close to business circles, including corporate executives. But they happen to be liberal by certain criteria.

That is, if you took a poll among corporate executives on matters like, say, abortion rights, I presume their responses would be what's called liberal. I suspect the same would be true on lots of social issues, like civil rights and freedom of speech. They tend not to be fundamentalist, born-again Christians, for example, and they might tend to be more opposed to the death penalty than the general population. I'm sure you'll find plenty of private wealth and corporate power backing the American Civil Liberties Union.

Since those are aspects of the social order from which they gain, they tend to support them. By these criteria, the people who dominate the country tend to be liberal, and that reflects itself in an institution like PBS.

So if Kevin Williamson wants to say the media has a "Corporate Executive and Investor Bias," then we have found common ground.

—Jonathan Schwarz