Rating: 
Summary: Again--It's About Time
Review: If you've been following the media at all most of this info is known already to you.Alterman puts in his book the quote from the GOP strategist who freely admits that the whole mantra of "the liberally biased media" is a sham, used to cow the middlers to the right and the lefties to the center. Not only does he thoroughly destroy that absurd myth with more information than everybody's compiled before, he points out the obvious: if the media is so "liberal," where are all the liberal points of view? Name one popular liberal national radio host. Name one with successful TV show--as I type this, news is now breaking that Donahue has been canceled on MSNBC, effective immediately. The most maddening--or revelatory, depending on your personal involvement--points concern all the financial magazines, the Wall Street Journal and the CNBCs of the world and their baldfaced skew towards touting big businesses that would ultimately become poster children for corporate corruption. Enron. WorldCom. Tyco. Analysts shamelessly pushed these companies in the media until the facade exploded--yet none of them suffered any long-term damage or credibility problems. He also details reporters' utter failure to cover the election with responsibility because they didn't like Gore. The anti-Gore stories were overwhelming in the final months of the campaign and the subsequent Florida fiasco, while Bush remained virtually untouched. Anybody who can explain that and then say with a straight face that the media is liberal (after eight years of Clinton bashing) ought to write their own book--which we can promptly file in the "fantasy/fiction" section.
Rating:
Summary: Right wing exposed
Review: Nice to see the right wing get exposed for the hypocrites they are. To a conservative, one is biased unless he or she espouses their views and their views only. Anything else, and you are "liberally biased." Fox News is a good example. This is a network that holds no pretenses that it has a right wing bias - BUT THEY TURN AROUND AND BLAST OTHER NETWORKS FOR BEING BIASED! Recently, on a Hardball show in which Chris Matthews, as usual, asked no tough questions to him, Bernie Goldberg even admitted that Fox News "tilts to the right." The other networks try to be balanced and tell both sides, but conservatives don't want that. They want their side only told, and anything that tells both sides is "liberally biased." This book exposes all of that.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read...
Review: An enjoyable, concise, and well designed book. Alterman asks the questions that have been avoided because of Bias. This is a must read for all who seek the truth and not popular discourse. It will help open minds of "liberals" and "conservatives", but the choice to change is still left to the individual. "Life is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see" - Beatles
Rating: 
Summary: What did feminism ever do to you? Part IV
Review: He does address abortion, but how can he not? It's a "foot soldiers" issue, as it were. (And though he might or might not want to discuss it, the right wing certainly does.) But in his discussion on the portrayal of the issue in the media (which he bases on one study), he can't grasp how abortion is a reproductive rights issue. (The right-wing groups that have targeted condoms and other forms of birth control certainly see it's relation to reproductive rights.) But I guess we give him points for attempting to address the issue.
No points are to be given for his portrayal of women. And it is in these sections that his lack of comprehension or sympathy to feminist issues are most apparent.
ON NAOMI WOLF AND GLORIA STEINEM
Two self-identified femists are mentioned in his book: Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf. Steinem pops up on page four when he lists Ann Coulter's (false) charges against her. That's it.
Naomi Wolf also gets a one page mention. Let's examine what Alterman has to say about Wolf::
"They mocked him [Gore], fairly, I suppose, for taking advice from the high-priced feminist writer/consultant Naomi Wolf about his earth-tone wardrobe."
Let's start with "high-priced." High-priced for a personal shopper/stylist? Is that it? And he concludes (or rather supposes) the mocking was fair.
It's at moments like these that I want to scream, "Alterman get your facts right or stop trying to help!"
This book, remember, is about media claims that are, in fact, incorrect. So you don't really expect to come across distorted myths in Alterman's writing. But there it is.
For those with longer memories, the false allegation that Wolf was in charge of Gore's personal wardrobe reminded us of 1972. That's when the journalist Bob Anson falsely reported that Gloria Steinem gave advice to George McGovern on what socks and shirts to wear. (Read Nora Ephrons essay "Miami" and you'll find out Anson apologized for the error but claimed it was the fault of someone else.)
Thirty years later, we get Alterman repeating a false rumor.
It may not be enough for him that Wolf denied this rumor. If it's not enough, he might want to check "The Daily Update: Howler History -- The Doctors Were In" on the February 7th, 2003 page of The Daily Howler where this rumor is once again refuted. (The Daily Howler gets three citations in What Liberal Media?)
Again, he does a book on media distortions and in it he perpuates a disproven, false (and sexist) rumor about Ms. Wolf.
ON SUSAN SONTAG THE "OBJECTIONABLE"
Susan Sontag gets a few mentions in the book as well. The one that caught my attention was this:
"While Susan Sontag wrote a short essay in the New Yorker that many people, including myself, found to be objectionable for its insensitivity to the victims of the attack, she never said she opposed the war."
At other places, Alterman refers to an interview in the online publication Salon. But here he's clearly referring to her writing in The New Yorker. I looked the essay up. It is indeed "short" -- it's a mere three paragraphs. And in it, Sontag doesn't comment on the victims (apparently her insensitivity). Her three paragraphs deal with the way the politicians and the media are speaking of 9-11 (her essay is dated September 24, 2001). She does question the use of "cowardly" to describe the hijackers -- as would many who study political science (as opposed to journalism). In my own political science classes (I was a poli-sci major) taught by conservative Bush & Reagan supporters words like "cowardly" would have been deemed inappropriate. (Words like "crazy," "insane," "delusional," etc. would have been used readily by the professors.) Coward is defined by Websters as "one who shows disgraceful fear or timidity" which doesn't seem to linguistically be appropriate to describe the hijackers of those planes. Cowardice itself is defined by Webster's as "lack of courage or resolution." Again, linguistically, Sontag is correct.
But no need for Alterman to set the record straight. (At three paragraphs, one wonders why he didn't seek permission to reprint the essay and let the reader decide on Sontag's statements. Instead he's willing to offer that he finds it objectionable -- but his objections only raise more questions. Is he referring to this essay or is he referring to her Salon interview -- which I haven't read?)
ON ANITA HILL
Don't expect to find any discussion of the "gender quake" in voting patterns on the national level that occurred in 1992 or any questions of whether this event resulted from the way the Senate and the media initially dismissed Anita Hill. (Wolf covered this in her 1993 book Fire With Fire. Probably Alterman was too busy picking out some male candidate's earth-tone suits to pick up Wolf's book.)
Instead, we get one citation. Where he stops for a moment to note ("shout out?"): ". . . David Brock's vicious and deceitful attack on Anita Hill, which he has since disowned ..." Yeah, that's one of the key points of Brock's Blinded By the Right. Brock spends many pages discussing both the Anita Hill articles and the book he wrote, why he wrote them, who "aided" him, etc.
We're in the midst of a paragraph on "analysis" of the people who embraced Brock's book (which was about Hill, but Alterman's already moved on). And this "analysis" -- as inadequate as it is -- falls apart further as Alterman supposes that those who wrote the favorable reviews weren't really "qualified" to judge Brock's writing (why?) or that they may have been motivated by a desire to support the "contrarian" (again, why?) or that they may have been trying to establish "street cred" (and again, why?).
Rating:
Summary: Freeper Alert!
Review: Looks like they're out to spam the reviews of a GREAT book with 1 star reviews.... P>By the way, I loved the book! It refutes every argument for the So-Called Liberal Media (SCLM). In fact, it flips the argument over by arguing there is a conservative/corporate bias present in most of "the Media." Although Alterman does point out that it is simplistic to argue that "the Media" is conservative or liberal. Just read the book. It's well written, researched, and fluid....
Rating:
Summary: Freeper Alert!
Review: ...By the way, I loved the book! It refutes every argument for the So-Called Liberal Media (SCLM). In fact, it flips the argument over by arguing there is a conservative/corporate bias present in most of "the Media." Although Alterman does point out that it is simplistic to argue that "the Media" is conservative or liberal. Just read the book. It's well written, researched, and fluid...
Rating: 
Summary: Read the Goldberg book
Review: Read Bernard Goldberg if you want an INSIDERS testimony to how the press works. Alterman has never been a part of the mainstream media so he relies on half-baked theories and circumlocutions to arrive at his conclusion. The conspiracies that Alterman hallucinates resemble the most absurd Rube Goldberg cartoon, while Bernard Goldberg's arguments and evidence are very straightforward. This book is trash.
Rating:
Summary: A reality check . . . finally!
Review: Liberal media?! Talk about right wing political correctness. Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?" sets the record straight on the true state of "balance" in the corporate (and Republican) owned media. Alterman's writing is witty, informative, and fact-based. He makes an effort to be fair although there is little fairness in this topic. He's not a doormat as libruls are expected to be but his zingers don't match the vitriol spewed by some of his book's subjects. The book's conclusions cannot be disputed so the smear about Alterman's comment about St. Rush is being used to douse his credibility but it rings false. Alas I doubt that the book will receive wide distribution as the conservative screeds bloviating about the librul media are more prominently displayed in the average mega bookstore while Alterman's work is tossed off to an obscure table. But this is the age of the double standard, nest pas?
Rating: 
Summary: Alterman is Half Right
Review: Alterman's book is about half right. The notion that the media is controlled by a cabal of the liberal elite is rubbish, and quite obviously so. However, one should not be deceived into thinking that the media is either "biased" or "conserative": the mass media operates exactly as it is designed to, in the interests of big business, and not of "conservatives" in any real sense of the word. To read a more persuasive examination of how the institutional structure of the mass media--advertising, ownership, reliance on government sources, and aversion to "flak"--dissuades honest, meaninful reporting, and promotes obedient propagandizing in the name of corporate elites, read Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent," the ultimate classic debunking of the media's claims about itself, a book which has withstood all serious criticisms for a decade now, and does not like Alterman resort to name-calling of so-called conservative pundits. Coulter and co. don't deserve the attention of serious people. Alterman demeans himself by engaging with these apologists for state violence.
Rating:
Summary: Alterman exposes right wing BIG LIE
Review: Alterman cites a Tom Tommorow cartoon to help make his point. He asks his readers to "undergo a thought experiment". Paraphrasing... "Imagine an expansive network of left wing think tanks bankrolled by secretive left-wing finaciers seeking to advance a radical left-wing agenda. Then imagine blatantly left-wing cable news networks and op-ed pages that promote left-wing ideas relentlessly. Then imagine angry liberals debating these left-wing proposals with weak mealy-mouthed conservatives on the Sunday talk shows. Then imagine an entire universe of left-wing talk radio hosts spending endless hours hammering these left-wing notions into the heads of tens of millions of listeners." Of course if your are talking about right-wing media bias all the above is true, but a left-wing media bias? It is to laugh.
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