Rating: 
Summary: Alterman is right on the mark....again!
Review: If you like Eric Alterman's columns in the Nation, or read his online blog, this book is a must. His analysis of the great American corporate-sponsored media hits home. The right wing for years would have us believe that there is some sort of liberal bias, or even more outrageous, a liberal control of the media. Alterman points out the fallacy of this, and the hard right turn the media took in the post Watergate years. Conservatives have done an admirable job convincing the American public that the media is controlled by the left, when in reality the exact opposite is true. Alterman's book turns the table on the likes of Ann Coulter and points out which side are the slanderers.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent debunking of a conservative myth
Review: Most of the people who posted negative reviews I've read here all seem to have one thing in common: apparently none of them bothered to read the book.I found the book exceedingly well-researched--though there were a number of editing errors (such as misspelled names). Alterman devotes different chapters to various facets of the media. What I found particularly interesting was his detailed espose of the right-wing "punditocracy" and the network of right-wing "think tanks" ("propaganda mill" is a more accurate term, in my opinion) who generate policy talking points. A must-read for anyone interested in how a small cabal of wealthy individuals (in particular, Richard Mellon Scaife the heir to the Mellon banking fortune, the Coors brewing company, and self-proclaimed "messiah" Rev. Sun Myung Moon) control much of the political discourse in this country.
Rating: 
Summary: Some comments on the reviewers...
Review: The reviewer "crt216" makes the following claim supposedly "proving" that the media is biased toward the right: "This is our liberal media? Conservative outrages are never covered (Rummy saying drafted soldiers added no value to the Vietnam War, Ann Coulter calling for a terrorist bombing of the NY Times, W supposedly helping to fight AIDS in Africa while ending funding for a UN program whiched provided condoms to Africa) by the media in this country, yet conservative pundits have the audacity to claim the media is liberal. This book was desperately needed to begin setting the record straight." Actually, the Rumsfeld story was covered by EVERY major media outlet as was Bush's condom program. Ann Coulter's comment was covered in the New York Observer. The Drudge Report has a huge collection of links to every major media outlet. You can search engine to find the stories, assuming the links have not been taken down. If crt216's command of facts is the same as Alterman's, then I would suggest steering clear of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: In your heart you know he's "right"
Review: This is an angry tome, written with conviction and passion. It falls short of the mark but not for the reasons most folks would think. There are actually two "mainstream" media. One consists of the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, CNN, Fox and MSNBC. The other consists of media from the "Fly-over" zone, radio talk shows, local newspapers, parochial magazines, etc. The first group ("Big Media") has enormous powers of influence and advocacy. They are heard and read around the world; they are quoted liberally if you pardon the pun. And, with the exception of FOX, they lean to the Left and favor the Democratic Party. I cannot understand why this should be shameful but it is denied routinely with vehemence, as if it were immoral. Instead we hear that they are "independent" without an opinion, - intellectual dishonesty at its best (or worst). The author contends that the media is more conservative than liberal and I would have to agree. What is not stressed is the disproportionate influence of the "Big Media" compared to the second tier. There are a boatload of "facts", some good, some strained - air time, number of stations, subject matter, etc... Corporate influence, a bugaboo to the Left, is discussed in depth. I dare say, though, he would be wont to criticize Ben & Jerrys, Hip Hop recording studios or Wall Street firms run by former Clinton aides. The author fails to address the main issue - that rightly or wrongly, the American people consider Big Media liberal by overwhelming margins (4-1 in the last survey I saw). Here's the point: Big Media mistakenly consider themselves moderate because they are surrounded by like-minded people. The scary thing is not a liberal cabal but but instead a uniformity of thought on almost every issue from abortion to gay rights to the environment to Iraq. Everyone has opinions but few have the power to promulgate those opinions under the guise of reporting the news. One reason for the amazing success of the conservative FOX is the realization that there is an alternative to the views held by Big Media.
Rating:
Summary: Well Docuemnted
Review: I never spent much time thinking about it, but I always sort of felt that the media was dominated by liberals. This book proved to me that I was wrong. This pretty well written, and very well documented work, establishes that the American Media is more conservative than liberal, and that it does not do a good job of providing us with fairly equal access to all reasonable points of view and the facts that support them, or do not support them, as the case may be.
Rating:
Summary: Alterman is a pathological liar
Review: It might not be intentional, he might merely lack the intelligence to think independently, as he lays down the mainstream liberal college prof garbage: America is run by secret Nazi white Christian male supremist gangs, even though you can't find any evidence through simple observation. No, you need Alterman vision, like x-ray vision, only it allows you see not what is hidden, but what isn't there at all! Denying liberal media bias makes about as much sense as denying the holocaust.
Rating:
Summary: Alternam has the facts on his side and he uses them
Review: For those of us who have followed the events in real time over tha past half decade there is not a lot in this book that is really new. particularly if you have been checking into the select handful of web pages (including Alterman's own) that specialize in debunking the conservative media. What Alterman has done here is to compile the most significant parts of it into a cohesive narrative, filling in the gaps with well-chosen references. For those that haven't had the time to pay that much attention to it, What Liberal Media should hit them like an avalanche. There are a lot of people around who have a vague idea that something is wrong with the media when it comes to politics, but still have the illusion that "the Press" (as we are taught in school) is free, and is a liberal guardian of our civil liberties. Few people can imagine how much the media has been captured by right-wing and conservative interests, but here is irrefutable proof. There is very pointed criticism here of some current icons, including the likes of O'Reilly, Russert, and Matthews. If you are looking for amusement there it is. This books should be required reading for all undergraduate journalism students. It should also be required reading for all practicing pundits, who should then be forced to write a rebuttal publically. I doubt they could without abandoning the facts.
Rating: 
Summary: That Liberal bias
Review: Alterman makes a good effort, but in the end falls short of his goal. Here's my thing - if you're going to call out Goldberg on the cover of your book and in your introduction, then you're cheating your readers by not challenging each of his points in 'Bias'. Instead, he references Goldberg's arguments in the actual body of the book for about 2 pages the rest of the time; before he starts to move on and make outlandish accusations about the conservative media - such as blaming Rush Limbaugh for Al Gore's defeat of 2000 (while at the same time whining about the Supreme Court's decision 2+ years ago). I could reference many examples of Alterman's flawed arguments, but for the sake of time I will only bring up one. When arguing that network news is not liberal, he goes out of his way to say that advertisors do not care about the evening news anyways, because their ratings are so dramatically falling, and they're primarily watched by old people. I have 2 points about this.
#1 - Why would he bother bringing this up if he really didn't believe that people like Dan Rather were biased towards the left? It's like he's trying to downplay the significance of the evening news.
#2 - Later, he would go on to complain about how all of the Sunday morning talk-shows are conservative. Well Eric, if you think the evening news has an insignificant aging audience, then what exactly do you call the demographic for Sunday morning shows? As a recent college graduate, I think I can say with a high level of confidence that most people my age are not awake at 8a.m. on your typical Sunday morning.
Rating: 
Summary: Depressing, imperfect, and absolutely necessary
Review: I can't help suspecting that the only people likely to read "What Liberal Media?" are those who, like myself, already agree with Alterman's thesis. Nonetheless, the fact that someone finally saw fit to write a book on this topic is encouraging in itself. As Alterman notes in the opening pages (and as some of the one-star reviews found here predictably demonstrate), the myth of The Liberal Media is so widespread that many people who should know better tend to assume it must be true simply because it's the only opinion they've ever heard anyone express. This well researched and thorough book could prove to be one of two elements that finally put a stop to such assumptions (the other, of course, being the mainstream media's blatant contempt for Al Gore and leniency toward George W. Bush throughout the 2000 campaign and beyond, which Alterman documents in considerable detail). Alterman tackles head-on most of the "evidence" conservatives regularly trot out as proof that the media is liberal. Perhaps most importantly, he debunks completely the 1992 Freedom Forum poll showing that most journalists voted for Clinton that year (it used a sample no legitimate pollster would approve of, and made no effort to probe beneath the surface with respect to why the respondents voted as they did). Also singled out for incomplete but convincing criticism are two recent books that play to the popular perception of the media as liberal, Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" and Ann Coulter's "Slander." I say "incomplete" not as a criticism of Alterman, but because a complete study of the inaccuracies found in those books would require a book longer than this one. Alterman does provide a generous sampling of false claims found in both screeds, most notably Goldberg's well-publicized claim that the media routinely labels Republican politicians as conservative but does not similarly refer to liberals as such. (As Alterman demonstrates, the claim was thoroughly baseless and Goldberg himself was unable to offer any evidence to support it on a rare occasion when he was challenged, but many media outlets repeated it as fact all the same. Several other examples of this phenomenon appear throughout the book.) For the most part, Alterman plays as well on offense as on defense, proving his own points as convincingly as he disproves those from the other side. It can be downright depressing for a liberal to read just how broad and deep the media's pro-Bush bias really is, although this is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone who has studied the issue in the past few years. Much of Alterman's evidence was previously available from alternative sources like the Daily Howler and consortiumnews.com, but he provides more context and perspective than I've seen elsewhere; and it really is refreshing that a mainstream publisher has finally offered us a book like this one. To Alterman's credit, he doesn't spare Bill Clinton and Al Gore from criticism for their often inept responses (or, in many cases, their lack of a response at all) to the malicious coverage they so frequently received during their administration and the 2000 campaign. The scope of his study is quite thorough, encompassing the media's relation to big business; the clout held by the religious right in both the media and the Republican Party; coverage of the Florida recount; and (most importantly in my view) the far right's disgusting manipulation of the aftermath of September 11 for its and Bush's benefit, a feat it could never have accomplished without help (or at least complacency) from the media. Alterman does make one crucial mistake, in my view. A critical part of his argument is the idea that most journalists do in fact lean to the left, but that as a matter of journalistic principle and as a result of bullying from the right, they try too hard to be objective and inadvertently report with a conservative bias. It's a very plausible theory, but Alterman shoots himself in the foot with the examples he provides. He singles out abortion and the death penalty as examples of issues that are often subject to a genuine liberal bias in the media. But he fails to even mention the media's complicity the mid-1990s controversy over 'partial-birth abortion,' a deliberately inflammatory term invented by the anti-choice movement for a procedure for which demand is nearly nonexistent except in cases where the health of the mother is at stake. Regarding the death penalty, he seems to see the recent coverage of false convictions in Illinois and inebriated lawyers in Texas as somehow insensitive to the families and loved ones of murder victims, for reasons he doesn't explain very elaborately. The chapter in which he makes this misstep raises some larger questions about 'politically correct intolerance' and genuine bigotry without offering any satisfactory answers to them, and a key portion of Alterman's argument is weakened somewhat as a result. But even with that admittedly significant weak point, this is a well researched, convincing study of the truth about bias in the modern media, and it's sorely needed. If nothing else, Alterman deserves credit for addressing an issue most people have long since given up on even thinking about. Here's hoping it inspires some of us to start doing so.
Rating:
Summary: Balance
Review: "What Liberal Media?" contained more documentation in a page or two than all of Bernie Goldberg's book published under the self-describing title "Bias". It's an excellent balance to the Republican National Media. For anyone who is interested in evaluating both sides of the issue, the book is a must read. Where Goldberg, Coulter and the rest of the Right rely on character assassination, strong opinions, and vicious phrasing, Alterman relies on facts. And he documents what he says, sourcing the quotes with footnotes anyone can go to for the original and be sure the quote or view wasn't taken out of context.
As is often the case with Liberals, Alterman is a little gentle with the far-right, extending them every benefit of the doubt, but even with that excessive fairness he compiles a document that is irrefutable. RJMcD
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