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By Neal Gabler
Oh, those crazy journalists. You know the ones I'm talking about. The one who described John Kerry as "French-looking" and made up some silly locution to show how out of touch he was -- "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" -- even though he never said it. Or the one who taunted Al Gore for claiming that he and his wife, Tipper, were the models for "Love Story" when Gore said no such thing. Or the one who described Bill Clinton as an "overweight band boy" and Hillary Rodham Clinton as "inauthentic." Or the one who tabbed Barack Obama "Obambi" and said that when visiting him at his office, she felt like Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells of St. Mary's," having to teach a bullied schoolboy how to box. Or the one who kept pressing Obama at a debate to fess up to his relationship with a 1960s terrorist.
Of course, what do you expect from right-wing nuts who will do and say anything to demonize Democrats? Except for one thing. All these examples -- and there are hundreds more -- were uttered not by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, David Brooks or any of the other Republican mouthpieces in our newspapers and on our airwaves. They were all said or written by liberal journalists, and even in a few cases by onetime Democratic operatives turned journalists, such as Chris Matthews and George Stephanopoulos. Indeed, the worst offender by far, the "Ingrid Bergman" in the example above, has been the New York Times' liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, who has never met a Democrat she hasn't disparaged.
(snip)
But if the fear of seeming to be overly partisan was generated by the right, there was another fear the left itself created: the fear that in an increasingly ironic and youth-oriented society, it would never do to be earnest. It might be seen as square and uncool. This may have accounted for the left's attitude of snarky superiority when it came to Gore, whom many hammered for being square, and Kerry, whom they ridiculed for being stilted, too sincere and elitist. For some left-wing media stars -- Dowd especially -- earnestness was a sin. They preferred -- or at the very least respected -- candidates who knew how to manipulate them, who knew how to game the system, who were cleverly insincere, even if those candidates were ideologically anathema. In 2000, Bush got much better press than Gore -- from the left. For instance, the idea that you should want to have a beer with a candidate -- a test that Gore supposedly failed -- was spread largely by the liberal media, especially Matthews but also by Joe Klein, who wrote a book about Democratic elitism.
Yet there's a deeper reason than cultural or political fear that may be driving the liberal media to eat their own: professional fears of marginalization. At the same time that the U.S. was lurching rightward politically, the ethos of the media was changing. Thirty-five years ago, journalists perceived themselves as public servants whose mission was to inform their readers and viewers. The best reporters simply got the facts right. The story was the star.
In the mid-1970s, that began to change, for a host of reasons. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein proved that reporters could be stars. …
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