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I have read all but the Fallows book and had the privilege of talking to Ken Auletta long ago at a Long Island garden party for a few minutes about the media. I notice Ailes left David Halberstam's The Powers That Be off the list. Coincidentally, I had lunch with a fellow named Blair Clark [who was Eugene McCarthy's campaign manager in '68] at the time I was in the middle of Halberstam's book and Clark denied that any of the five statements Halberstam made about him in The Powers That Be were true. So I guess Ailes' judgment about books is as acute as his amazing skill in the production of TV News.
Here are the top five in Ailes' all-time great-book list:
1. "The Medium Is the Message" by Marshall McLuhan (Bantam, 1967).
"The book also comes titled "The Medium Is the Massage," a typesetter's error that amused McLuhan so much, he decided to keep it. I was just starting in the television business when I read this book and recognized immediately the nerve it struck. In those days, we were still filming in black and white. There were no satellite hook-ups. But it was already clear to me that people who knew how to use television had enormous power at their disposal. McLuhan proposed that the collective way we watch television has created a "global village," one that is more affected by the nature of the medium than by the content of the message. I'd only add this to the formula: Never underestimate the influence of dominant TV news personalities, like Walter Cronkite in his day and those who have followed."
2. "The Kingdom and the Power" by Gay Talese (World Publishing, 1969).
"Compared with the troubled New York Times of today, the newspaper Mr. Talese describes here--in his inside history of the Times from the postwar years through the 1960s--seems to exist in a golden age. Yes, we see the clash of giant egos and the infighting over everything from the coverage of the Kennedys to the appointment of a theater critic. But who, back then, could have imagined the Jayson Blair scandal or a deteriorating Times culture that allowed it to happen? When I was growing up, people thought: If it's in the Times, then it must be true. Who thinks that now? Reading Mr. Talese's hugely enjoyable, exquisitely detailed book in 2006 has to be a bittersweet experience."
3. "Breaking the News" by James Fallows (Pantheon, 1996).
"This book stands out for how directly it addresses the arrogance and negativism of the press, which run counter to the way Americans feel about their country. Consider the media's current obsession with the wiretapping story. If an al Qaeda member is phoning somebody in the U.S., what are we supposed to believe--that he's looking for travel tips? Americans know better. On other matters, they can be more susceptible to media persuasion. Decrying the development of "attitude" journalism as a desperate attempt to hold onto audiences, Mr. Fallows says that leading journalists in the 1990s (the period under discussion) presented views of public life and public figures much bleaker than the ones they held themselves. The condition he describes so well has not changed."
4. "Three Blind Mice" by Ken Auletta (Random House, 1991).
"Mr. Auletta's tremendous access to sources was the making of this entertaining book, subtitled "How the TV Networks Lost Their Way." Among other things, it shows how network people spend their lives sucking up, stabbing each other in the back and then going to corporate meetings promoting teamwork. I remember, from my own experience at NBC, the endless seminars on the subject of integrity. Chronicling the networks' struggles under new managers as audiences declined, Mr. Auletta draws on a vast reservoir of anecdotes. Some of them are familiar, like the one about Dan Rather's angrily marching off the "CBS Evening News" set, leaving the screen blank for six minutes. Most of the stories, though, come as insider intelligence of a high order."
5. "Bias" by Bernard Goldberg (Regnery, 2001).
"This breakthrough book says: Let's stop pretending, let's finally acknowledge the elephant in the room--the fact that the media, composed largely of liberals, view the world through the prism of leftist politics and report the news accordingly. The subtitle of this best seller is "A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," but Mr. Goldberg quickly became an outsider at the network after he first spoke out publicly on media bias. This treatment by CBS surprised the veteran newsman, because he had once been a liberal himself. But Mr. Goldberg also happened to believe in keeping an open mind. That's what made him unacceptable to his liberal colleagues."
I have also read Goldberg's latest book, America's Hundred Most Dangerous People and although Goldberg's objective news instincts still prevail, his sense of betrayal at the hands of the liberal media elite is still very strong.
In case there was the slightest doubt that the MSM top-twenty are not biased to the left, the UCLA/U.ofMissouri three year study erases all doubts except for the truest leftest believers about the strong tilt of US print and electronic media. The Study can be summarized as follows:
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."
"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co-author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.
The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.
Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low-population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.
Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Only Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.
The most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and ABC's "Good Morning America" were a close second and third.
"Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill," Groseclose said.
Not surprisingly, the MSM virtually ignored the UCLA Study when it was published in December.
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