cover image Slanting the Story: The Forces That Shape the News

Slanting the Story: The Forces That Shape the News

Trudy Lieberman. New Press, $21.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-1-56584-577-0

""How the right wing has come to dominate the public policy debates is one of the most significant political stories of the last two decades,"" declares Lieberman, health policy editor at Consumer Reports. This dominance has come, she says, through the aggressive strategies used by well-financed think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, to frame political debates in the media. Lieberman backs up her thesis with effective case studies. She notes that the conservative Capital Research Center's ""ad hominem attack"" on the liberal American Association of Retired Persons, as part of a campaign to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, resulted in an ""avalanche"" of news coverage echoing various charges made by the Center. Likewise, she says, the ""modernization"" (i.e., the weakening) of the Food and Drug Administration was effected by a campaign by a handful of right-wing think tanks on an antiregulatory campaign. Lieberman doesn't aim her cannons at the right-wing think tanks alone; she also criticizes what she sees as the intellectual laziness of many in the news media. News stories, she argues, often fail to identify the ideological bias of their sources and fail to provide context for their charges, resulting in ""misleading and one-sided reporting."" In a few cases, the author does not seem critical enough when analyzing the think tanks' claims for credit as the source of news stories, and she unfortunately doesn't grill the journalists whom she claims have too readily accepted think-tank propaganda. But she sagely observes that the ""old journalistic model"" may not work well when confronted by a ""sustained, well-funded lobbying effort"" and that journalists committed to neutrality are unwilling to supply critical context. She also warns that liberal advocacy groups must better promote their arguments and counter their opponents. (May)