Rating: 
Summary: Essential reading on media bias
Review: In short, this is the most thoroughly documented book on media and media bias that has appeared in some time. A bargain, in that Alterman covers so much and with so much detail. He is most concerned with exposing what he sees as misinformation and deception by such media outlets as Dow Jones and News Corp, newspaper columnists such as George Will and Robert Novak, radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, and extreme right-wing groups such as the Western Journalism Center and the National Taxpayers Union. He argues, with copious evidence, that Gore was unfairly and inaccurately portrayed by the media, while George W. Bush was lucky that the media overlooked his very questionable selling of Harken Energy stock, as well as his close relationship with Ken Lay and Enron. Alterman's analysis of the media's role in the ballot counting controversy in Florida is compelling reading. His chapter on economic matters was comparatively disappointing, however.The biggest strength of this book is its detailed evidence. The History Ph.D. in Alterman comes out here, in that he documents just about everything. The biggest weakness is that his lively prose does itself reflect his own left-leaning biases. He is never cruel or mean-spirited, though, like Michael Savage or Anne Coulter. He is, after all, a professional, not a hack. His book, therefore, should be taken seriously, because the integrity of the media--his principal subject--is vital in our constitutional, participatory democracy.
Rating: 
Summary: Selective Evidence
Review: Alterman selects his documentation as carefully for his work as Bellesles did for his. I feel that when objective review is applied he will be found to be just as accurate. He labels anyone who is not blatently Left leaning as Conservative and uses this to dismiss what America sees on it's televisions and front pages every day.
Rating: 
Summary: 1001 examples of conservative bias but so what???
Review: This is a good book, although titled in a very misleading way. An extremely descriptive title would be: 1001 examples of conservative bias in the media. The overwhelming and deadly problem here is that there is no attempt whatsoever to demonstrate that someone else can't write a book titled 2001 or 3001 or 4001 examples of liberal bias in the news. Accordingly you are then left with no basis whatsoever to know if the the media is more biasd toward liberals or conservatives.
Probably the best way to demonstrate what seems painfully perspicuous to conservative Republicans is to merely look at the results. Conservative Republicans stand for, most noticeably and obviously, smaller gov't; yet the gov't has steadily grown and grown until the last Federal Budget now totals a whopping $2.2 trillion. In fact, liberals have gotten 10 times more, in programs and inflation adjusted dollars, than the American Socialist Party ever dreamed of in the 1920's, and still there is absolutely no end in sight to this relentless addiction. Everything voters know and believe comes from and through the media, so how could anyone with even half a brain argue that there is a fairness or conservative bias in the media when the govt becomes more and more liberal with each election cycle? There is an obvious liberal bias!
Some, though, might argue that the news media is fair but that people vote liberal because of what they learn in schools and/or colleges, which, in reality, are just another form of media. Again, it is painfully obvious that the secondary schools are gov't funded schools controlled by gov't teachers' unions that almost exclusively support liberals, while conservative Republicans want to eliminate the liberal gov't schools in favor of voucher supported private schools and, ultimately, purely private schools. College professors present a similar bias. Surveys show that they (as well as major news media personal) are about 93% liberal Democrats. I'm not aware of anyone who seriously disputes this. So, is the media biased? The answer is an obvious "yes," although the amount of media bias that comes from each media category, i.e., secondary schools, colleges and universities, and major news sources (primarily TV, Radio, and Newspapers) is not known or knowable.
And, all of this is to say nothing of the broader cultural media(TV, Film,Theater) which are visibly biased toward liberalism to even the blind. There, we are conditioned from early childhood to accept the liberal bias. In fact, it is even more impossible to get a job in the arts as a Republican than it is in academia. TV, film, and theater is now almost exclusively in the hands of the left.
The media bias and concomitant liberal drift of the country is so widespread that ultimately you have to blame it not on the media but,sadly,on human ignorance. For example, the liberal position is that if you are for prescription drug coverage for the aged you are kind, sensitive, and caring, and if you are against it, as most conservatives are, you are mean and nasty or worse. The meretricious liberal position is easily understood by even a child, while the Republican position is far more complex even for most educated adults. In the arts, the left tells us that Murphy Brown is equal and perhaps superior to Ward and June Cleaver at parenting. Again, even a child can merely accept the very beautiful,charasmatic,liberal and husbandless Murphy Brown as a loving single parent, but it takes a conservative nuanced intellectual judgment to come to a conclusion about what familial structure is actually best and ought to be encouraged. The left always wins based on the simplicity and childlike appeal of their positions. The war in Iraq: give peace a chance; from the conservative right: a very brutal sacrifice now will probably result in significant gains over the long run.
The book ends, truthfully and sadly I think, mostly blaming us for being too dumb to buy sophisticated news analysis. My advice is to skip this pointless book and read one that will make you a sophisticated consumer of news, and will enable you to always spot the bias, rather than be manipulated by it. I highly recommend the classic "Understanding The Difference Between Democrats and Republicans," It is the subject that Mr. Alterman meant to write about. Instead he chose to bury us under an utterly meaningless list of conservative bias as if to trick us into forgeting the far bigger list of liberal bias.
Rating:
Summary: Escape from reality!
Review: Do you like fairy tales? Stories of incredible imagination? Absolute infactual absurdity? This will be your all-time favorite!
Rating:
Summary: He backs up his facts.
Review: Lately I've been interested in the polemics of media. And others have been too, judging by the recent deluge of books on the matter.
I read Blinded By The Right and then Bias, both enjoyable reads but lacking something important--facts and figures. Those books were mainly anecdotal autobiographies with a few little axes to burn. Then, Alterman comes along with facts to back up his stuff. A superior effort, by far!
The main problem with media polemics is the stare-in-your-eyes bluffing that the facts given are true, and when proof is requested all sorts of defensive mechanisms are thrown out: name calling, subject changing, fact spinning, martyrism, etc.
Alterman, though not entirely unbiased, does a better job with proving his point than anyone out there.
Rating:
Summary: hope it changes minds
Review: I hurried up and wrote this review to counteract the poor reviews of conservatives who may or may not have actually read this book. In What Liberal Media Alterman breaks the different types of media into different chapters such as print, television, and the internet. He argues that conservatives have an advantage with TV pundits. I agree. For example, think of Shawn Hannity and Allen Colmes. They about found the most un-feisty and slowest on his feet liberal they could find to go up against Shawn Hannity. Also, think about the way Crossfire was before they added Carville and Begala. Alterman says that reporters tend to be liberal on social issues like gun-control and abortion. That is basically the whole conservative arguement for the liberal media. Conservatives don't mention that reporters tend to be like republicans when it comes to money, and don't care about electing Democrats, as Alterman shows in his chapter on the 2000 election. People who visit a few select progressive websites will know alot of the stuff in this book already. I hope this book will get information out to people who aren't aware of those sites. The reasons I didn't give it 5 stars, are some of the annoying errors such as the repeated mispelling of a woman's name.
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Summary: At last some Analysis of the RIGHT!
Review: ... Comes now a liberal critic who does what the right hates--he thinks through all the right wing charges as a reasoned and critical mind should. It is not as funny as Limbaugh, nor as facile as Fox and Brit Hume. Still, it stands the test of good rigorous analysis. This is a good book ....
Yours for the revolution!
Rating:
Summary: Interesting read
Review: It was an interesting read showing how the 'liberal' meadia is not really liberal. I didnt like his tearing apart of Coulter and other conservatives. That is something that is childish and done by conservatives like Hannity and Savage. He also labels Howard Stern as a conservative???????
Rating:
Summary: Who's Really Bias
Review: In Eric Alterman's newest book. he takes on the contention of Bernard Goldberg, author of Bias, and Ann Coulter, author of Slander,and other prominent public figures that the American news media has a bias towards left wing causes and political issues. While providing many statistics and anecdotal evidence in defense of his premise, Mr.Alterman can never break away from leaving the reader with the idea that the purpose and premise of his book is both tendentious and predetermined and that he is not seriouly engaged in the discovery of the truth so much as he is engaged in discrediting others who are on the other side of political spectrum. Rather than writing an objective argument as to why the media is not as liberal as critics such as Bernard Goldberg. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and others allege it is, Mr. Alterman ends up tilting at windmills and working to weaken his own argument with his frequent outburst in ad hominen attacks. No doubt his fans will lap this kind of red meat language like hungry lions, but the appeal beyond them to a more circumspect and tougher audience will go largely disregarded. Mr. Alterman's presentation is in the manner of an absolute, that he has discovered the truth about the media, the whole truth, and the only truth, but the reader is left wondering if he has only found a black hole. The other point that one is left wondering about is if Mr. Alterman has any respect for opinions that differ from his own. His frequent outbursts that so and so represents a danger to our "political public" or that this or that person "lack cilivty." rings somewhat hollow when coming from his poisoned pen. Alterman himself has frequently shown that he "lacks civity" and has declared that the nation would "be better off" without certain people and their audiences. Ultimately. this book fails to prove its original contention and preaches to its own chorus. It may persuade a few, but not many. Like many books of this type, it is a minor tome. a book of the moment, written for those willing to buy into Mr. Alterman's brand of polics, but largely unconvincing to the more serious and discerning audiences.
Rating:
Summary: Unable to see the Church doors
Review: Eric Alterman, a political writer for such leftward magazines as the Nation and Mother Jones takes on the Strum und Drang that the so-called Big Media has a itself a leftward tilt in its news and political coverage. Arguing his premise by statistics and by anecdote, the canny Alterman reminds this reader of an old dog chasing its tail or a knight errant on a Quixotic quest riding a tired swayback on a road to La Mancha. At times, Alterman tosses caution to the wind as divulged by his misguided polemic on Bernard Goldberg's life experiences as a 20 year minion of CBS news, or his intemperate remarks about Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, whom Alterman sees "as dangerous to our political public." It is hard to take these charges seriously. Alterman frequently engages in the same "lack of civility," he discovers in Limbaugh and O'Reilly, while he works his arguments to death, splitting hair after hair, and counting pin after pin. In the end, the reader feels like a Manta Ray has stung him and made him numb. Alterman can never escape his own political partisanship, as is shown by his treatment of the Bush-Gore campaign, so he can never get at an Aristotelian truth. Hence, Alterman's truth is subjective, not objective. Andrew Sullivan recently wrote his own take on Mr. Alterman's dubious premise and parodied it in the title of his essay, "What Conservative Media." < As Mr. Sullivan points out, "the closer you look at this notion of a monolithically rightward-moving American media, the less impressive it sounds. To begin with, the entire theory is based on cable news." He points out that Fox News "has a viewership ... of 800,000, but that the "combined audience for all the evening network news .... is over 33 million." Mr. Sullivan's concludes that "There really is no serious conservative competition." There is never any Socratic search for the truth in this book as its major theme is a forgone conclusion. Never for a moment does Alterman doubt he has found the truth about the media. Like the Church Vicar, Alterman is preaching to his pew. His focus is narrow and never reaches beyond the members of his church. Socrates said, "Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth." Unable to see beyond the Church doors, Alterman fails to see the wider world beyond to "form wider opinions of the truth" and, therefore, fails to convince his version of truth is more than just that or a resemblance to truth.
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