I'm glad that we're crossing paths in this impressive building complex here at CNN Center before it becomes known as Time Warner Center.
My last visit to a CNN studio was a number of years ago, when I was a guest on "Crossfire," paired with a very conservative Hollywood scriptwriter who was on the satellite screen from Los Angeles. A guy sitting next to me in the studio says, "I'm Patrick Buchanan, from the right" -- and I could believe that. And then the other guy sitting next to me says, "I'm Tom Braden, from the left." And I'm thinking: This is the Tom Braden who's a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency, who once wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post titled, "Why I'm Glad the CIA Is Immoral." This is supposed to be my tag-team partner.
This week, Buchanan is on the cover of Time magazine, and on a roll.
Here's what I want to stress: Populism, historically and in the present day, has taken two general paths. Only one of them is well represented on TV, talk radio and even most op-ed pages.
The scapegoating road is well traveled by the Buchanans and the Robert Novaks, the Rush Limbaughs and the G. Gordon Liddys. But those who have taken the other fork in a populist journey -- progressives -- are very sparsely represented.
It's true that op-ed pages do better than TV networks in terms of diversity. But that's a high jump over low standards.
Think of the names of the most widely syndicated liberal columnists and try to append the adjective "populist" to them -- Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory... In most cases it would be absurd. Overall, mass media offer the public either mainstream pundits who differ on how to shore up the status quo, or populists of the right-wing variety. Largely excluded are advocates of progressive populism who explicitly reject scapegoating and who challenge the power of large corporations.
Why is the field of populist punditry ceded almost entirely to rightists? Put another way: Why is it so uncommon for media forums to include unabashedly progressive critiques of the negative effects of corporate power?
The media's narrow range of discourse, from the near left to the far right, gives the public the impression that there are basically two positions worthy of debate -- defenders of a continuum that shares corporate assumptions, or the xenophobic, women-bashing, anti-gay, racialist voices that appeal to bigotry.
Why can't we do a better job of broadening the range beyond Anthony Lewis to George Will -- or, these days, Anthony Lewis to Joseph Sobran? When the boundaries have been widened in recent years, the expansion has almost invariably been rightward. This fall, a large newspaper began running Sobran's syndicated column with the explanation that it wanted to publish "unvarnished conservatism." But the same paper does not come close to publishing an "unvarnished" progressive column on any kind of a regular basis.
Working as a syndicated columnist, I've been told by some op-ed editors: "We've got progressive views covered -- we run Anthony Lewis." This is the Anthony Lewis who wrote a column a couple of years ago denouncing labor unions for having the nerve to lobby against NAFTA... In fact, many of the most widely touted "liberal" columnists wouldn't know a working person if their limousine ran one over.
What are some op-ed pages doing that merits praise? I sense more attention to ideas, in sharp contrast to news sections. And in recent years we've seen more gender, racial and ethnic diversity on editorial pages. And that's a positive trend. But diversity of race, gender and ethnicity hardly guarantees much diversity of ideas.
Data provided by syndicates are not particularly reliable when we try to gauge exact numbers. But the most recent independent study I'm aware of -- by the Featurank organization back in 1990 -- found seven syndicated op-ed columnists who were each carried in more than 100 papers with combined circulation of over 10 million: George Will, James Kilpatrick, David Broder, Ellen Goodman, Mike Royko, William Safire and William F. Buckley.
Here's an assessment that came from the editor of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review journal, Adam Meyerson, a couple of years before that study was released: "Journalism today is very different from what it was 10 or 20 years ago. Today, op-ed pages are dominated by conservatives. We have a tremendous amount of conservative opinion, but this creates a problem for those who are interested in a career in journalism after college... If Bill Buckley were to come out of Yale today, nobody would pay much attention to him. He would not be that unusual...because there are probably hundreds of people with those ideas [and] they have already got syndicated columns."
Getting syndicated now is tough. This summer, the president of the New York Times Syndicate, John Brewer, told the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (quoted in Editor & Publisher): "There are very few competitive markets left and fewer newspapers." But he added that space is still opening up for "certain kinds of features" -- for instance, "conservative columns by minorities or women."
The media tilt means a very uphill battle for progressive columnists. And there's another factor that I want to mention. Reinforcing prevalent concepts, attitudes and ideas actually requires less time and space -- it's like pressing pre-installed buttons. These are notions that are virtual keystrokes on the word processor of a John Leo or George Will or dozens of other syndicated columnists as they make their standard denunciations: political correctness, multiculturalism, counterculture, anti-Western values, dependency, reverse discrimination...
But if you're really outside the range of conventional wisdoms, you need to build and explore themes that AREN'T in the mass-media air. That's all the more reason that progressives should have a regular place at the op-ed table, not just an occasional temporary seat.
Today, many lives are in the balance. The immense poverty in this country, let alone elsewhere in the world, is heart-breaking. The Gingriches and the Clintons offer no plausible scenarios for substantially improving the situation. Their deference to corporate power precludes even considering drastic remedies.
Meanwhile, the onward march of op-ed punditry reminds me of a scene in Mark Twain's book "Roughing It": A group of hikers are wandering through snowy mountains; it's near dusk, the cold night is descending, and they're lost. Actually, they're feeling a bit frightened. So they're relieved to look ahead and see a trail of footprints. The trail seems sure to lead them to the safety of town. They follow the footsteps in the snow. But, oddly, shelter doesn't come into view. Instead, the men just keep walking -- and they begin to notice that the trail of footprints is getting wider and wider. Finally, the awful truth begins to dawn on them: They've been following their own circular tracks.