Still a hero.
Thirty-four years after Des Moines, Agnew's speech still resonates

The good news for the Republican conservatives is that Spiro Agnew might have been right. The bad news for the Republican conservatives is that Spiro Agnew might have been right.
Nearly 35 years after Agnew went on national television to rebut the “querulous criticism” of President Richard Nixon's policies, the late Republican vice president opened a debate about liberal bias in the news media that has yet to fully abate. In fact, so important was Agnew's speech that a group of more than 100 academics rated his speech the 50th most important American speech of the 20th century - the only speech by a sitting vice president to be so honored.
If anything, the debate he kindled is raging more prominently than ever. For example, Former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg attacked his colleagues in the press with his book: “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.” Then, The Nation columnist and historian Eric Alterman hit back with: “The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Truth about BIAS and the News.”
But somewhere lost amid the din of this on-going fight was what Agnew actually said. For one thing, he never used the term “liberal media.” Agnew wondered about the effects of media on American politics generally.
His thoughts - including those of his primary speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, focused on broad issues of the role of the press in American society. Many of his thoughts preceded much of the best of scholarly writing on media over the last three decades.
It can be said the thoughts in Agnew's speech presaged much of the discussion in media scholarship. In general terms, he spoke in outline form of how media set the agenda, of how media frame news stories, of how corporations are taking over media corporations and of how media professionals tend to have similar backgrounds and outlooks.
That Agnew said something of substance is a little hard to imagine given his reputation for having resigned in disgrace for tax evasion and for later having acted as a middleman between Saddam Hussein and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and it is even harder to imagine him saying the same things in today's media environment with its partisan Republican voices on talk radio. And, to be sure, elements of his speech don't withstand the test of time.
Nevertheless, a re-reading of Agnew's speech might well be in order in light of three decades of scholarly writing and in light of the two prominent book-length arguments.
With that background, it is worth asking again, are media liberal? This paper will conclude that, much as Agnew's speech was more complicated than a simple polemic attacking liberals in the media, to ask whether the media are biased toward liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans is more complicated than a simple answer allows. Indeed, to ask about a liberal bias is to ask the wrong question because any meaningful answer to questions of bias depends on how such questions are answered.
The right question is whether media can help a society govern itself.

First, some history.
Spiro Agnew, the former governor of Maryland, rose to the vice presidency with only six years of public service on his resume. He had served in Maryland during a time of racial riots and new initiatives that brought him prominence in the Republican Party. Nixon selected him as a way to help build Republican bridges to the South and as a way to bring perceived expertise about urban issues to the administration.
Nixon got a useful hatchet man as well.
In late fall of 1969, nine months into Nixon's presidency; the political communication of the modern Republican Party arguably began. Nixon struggled with the communication and frames of the anti-War movement and so planned a speech on Nov. 3, 1969, on national television to discuss his commitment to continue the Vietnam war. The speech became known as The Silent Majority speech.
In memos to H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, preceding the speech, Nixon asked his staff to develop a communication follow-up plan. As part of that follow-up, he requested that the staff regularly follow the press and find ways of counteracting bad reports that emerged in the media.
Follow-up planning memos from Nixon's staff showed no role for Agnew in the plan, but Agnew found his way onto the president's agenda anyway.
About a week before Nixon's speech, Agnew lashed out at anti-war intellectuals, calling them “an effete corps of impudent snobs.” His broadside landed him prominently on the cover of the nation's newsweeklies even as Nixon gave the most-important speech in his young presidency.
So, there was a natural confluence of events, and at some point in staff meetings around Nov. 6, 1969, the administration decided to have Agnew give a speech on network commentators as part of its follow-up to Nixon's Silent Majority speech.
As the date got closer, the president's staff discussed a variety of ways of pushing Agnew's speech onto network television. They considered inviting billionaire H. Ross Perot to pay for time on national television. Instead, in the day before his speech, scheduled for a Republican event in Des Moines, administration officials discussed calling the national TV networks and suggesting to those networks that if the networks were objective and accurate, they would have to cover the Agnew speech criticizing them or risk being seen as unfair.
Evidently, the persuasive strategies, whatever they exactly were, worked. All three major networks pre-empted their regular evening newscasts for Agnew's speech on Nov. 13, 1969.
In Des Moines, he discussed “the importance of the television news medium to the American people” and criticized the executives and anchors of the major American networks.
Some of his criticisms were about how few news outlets were on TV - only three news networks - and those fail to stand the test of time.
But, on balance, Agnew's arguments increasingly seem solid. Television, Agnew said in essence, is so powerful that “no medium has a more profound influence over public opinion. Nowhere in our system are there fewer checks on vast power.”
Viewers numbered in excess of 40 million. Haldeman, as was his way, commented in his meeting notes preparing for the speech that “[Lyndon] Johnson could never rally the country this way.”
Following up on his success, Agnew delivered a second speech in Montgomery, Alabama, one week later criticizing The New York Times and The Washington Post. Taken together, his commentary can be said to affect all journalistic media.

The political and policy lessons on the Republicans were significant.
First, Agnew generated more than 20,000 cards and letters, and they ran more than five to one in his favor. Accordingly, the administration learned that turning the media into whipping boys could pay political dividends. Speechwriter Pat Buchanan wrote the President later that month with this simple summary of the lessons, “Simply … we have discovered an issue on which we can rally a majority of the country and the South.”
A second lesson was that some in the administration began to question the actual bias of the news media.
On the one hand, Agnew, clearly thought media were biased. He wrote FCC Chairman Dean Burch about a month after his speech that he was frustrated with television critics who said his words implied some hidden message of censorship:
“This, more than anything else, indicates to me the validity of the criticism. For too long the pundits have been preoccupied with their interpretations of what various public spokesmen may have had in the backs of their minds rather than a straightforward report of the material actually presented. It is just this kind of editorializing which brings about the bias and slant that has been so prevalent in recent years.”

But, on the other hand, Jeb Magruder, who oversaw the monitoring of media coverage for President Nixon, wrote in January 1970 to Haldeman, “Of 11 news publications and TV programs monitored regularly, none reported information in a manner justifying counter-action.”
Haldeman seemed to disagree with Magruder and wrote back with emphasis:
“This [result of monitoring] is now S.O.P. [standard operating procedure] Hard to believe all coverage is so mediocre as to require no praise and no condemnation; so accurate as to require no correction, so fair as to require no counterbalance. Is it really?”

Beyond those lessons, the speeches focused the members of the administration on a third lesson, the power of new forms of focused communication:
For example, during this period, the administration talked of shoring up the American Enterprise Institute as an outside organization to lend support to administration policies as outside experts. Similarly, some of the first discussions of using computers to provide targeted, political mailing lists and databases emerged in the White House staff at this time. Nixon's push to his staff, therefore, changed American politics around the nexus of Agnew's speech.

Agnew's Des Moines speech was seen as a joyful victory for the president's team, probably too much so. Haldeman manically wrote in his notes the night of the speech that “the SOBs of nets [networks] must have died when had to run that.” Then, one day after the speech, the first mention of an independent campaign committee to re-elect Nixon emerges in White House notes. “Let us designate the funds,” Haldeman wrote. Of course, just such a committee led to Nixon's downfall at Watergate.

At the same time, the scholarly study of media was going through one of its most important transformations. Some of the scholarship seemed to be scrambling. As researchers were trying to be specific about the effects of media consumption, they had trouble. Those researchers had conceived of mass media as a hypodermic needle delivering content and impulses into audiences, which, in turn caused predictable actions among children or viewers. The classic question was do media make children violent?
But the research failed to give consistent results. Researchers found effects of media consumption to be relatively weak and limited, even case-by-case. Joseph Klapper, the father of this line of reasoning, argued that the main, limited effect of media was to reinforce existing attitudes but little more. But this seemed insufficient to many scholars, and new approaches were needed. Agnew's speech incorporated ideas that appeared like many of the new ideas that have emerged in the ensuing decades of research.

The simplest frame to explain the meaning of Agnew's attacks on media is to look at Magruder's note to Haldeman saying few stories caused concern and then note Buchanan's letter to Nixon about lessons learned. This frame suggests that Republicans knew media weren't biased but said so anyway for partisan political advantage.
The reality, as always, remains more complicated. For one thing, many Republicans were genuinely convinced with Agnew that they faced a biased media. For another, although many of Agnew's points are rarely cited in scholarly literature, he spoke intelligently of emerging media issues. Goldberg's book, in comparison, fails to meet that test.

Five important themes in Agnew's speeches emerged.
One was, in the words of scholar Bernard Cohen, the ability of media to tell people not so much what to think but what to think about.
Agnew said, “They can create national issues overnight. … The networks made 'hunger' and 'black lung disease' national issues overnight … They have focused the nation's attention on its environmental abuses.”
This idea is now an article of faith among many media scholars. Within three years of Agnew's speech, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw noted that by measuring public opinion about which issues were most important to the public and comparing that opinion with what appeared in news media, media do determine what issues are salient in the minds of audiences. More than 200 studies have noted this effect. This theory, usually called agenda setting, suggests that even the ways stories are framed can influence public opinion such that citizens come to view stories in the way media write about them.
Agnew's second argument came in his speech in Montgomery. He sounded almost as though he were a Socialist scholar taking on Rupert Murdoch's Fox, Disney or AOL Time-Warner worried about the concentration of media power:
“The American people should be made aware of the trend toward the monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands.
“Should a conglomerate be formed that tied together a shoe company with a shirt company, some voice will rise up righteously to say that this is a great danger to the economy; and that the conglomerate ought to be broken up.
“But a single company, in the Nation's Capital, holds control of the largest newspaper in Washington D.C., and one of the four major television stations, and an all-news radio station, and one of the three major national new magazines - all grinding out the same editorial line.”

Numerous scholars, from Ben Bagdikian to David Croteau and William Hoynes, continue to make that argument. Among the biggest debates facing the Federal Communications Commission today is whether ownership rules should be relaxed further. Of interest to conservative Republicans, many large corporations grind out the same editorial line of Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage across hundreds of stations nationwide.
A third Agnew argument was how media executives often come from a similar background of elite schools and how they read similar publications that contain similar views making, in effect, media into an echo chamber. He said,
“We can deduce that these men thus read the same newspapers, and draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints.”

Scholarly examples abound about the power of shared viewpoints including the controversial Rothman-Lichters surveys of journalists showing that journalists, as a group, had attitudes that were more liberal than average Americans. Another example of this line of thinking is the example of pack journalism that came from scholars such as James Fallows.
Scholars Pamela Shoemaker and Lucig Danielian have said deviance affects news judgment. Given that unusualness - deviance -- is a traditional news value, what is unusual is determined by the dominant culture within the news business. That dominance creates news that focuses on the unusualness of groups outside this cultural or national elite, and such perceptions of deviance impose cultural values on others.
Agnew's fourth point was broader even if laden with racial overtones. He said conflict in the news might well damage American democracy:
“Our knowledge of the impact of network news on the national mind is far from complete. But some early returns are available. … We have enough information to raise serious questions about its effect on a democratic society.
“Several years ago, Fred Friendly, one of the pioneers of network news, wrote that its missing ingredients were “conviction, controversy and a point of view.” The networks have compensated with a vengeance.
“And in the networks' endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask what is the end value … to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result … to inform or to confuse?
“… Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent. One minute of Eldridge Cleaver is worth ten minutes of Roy Wilkins. … Normality has become the nemesis of the evening news.”

In 1997, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her colleague Joseph Cappella analyzed the coverage of the health care reform debate of President Clinton. They found that media coverage of the issue generally focused on a two-sided conflict - what they termed reporters' “fatal attraction.” Without conflict, serious proposals failed to reach the public consciousness. The coverage also focused on concurring scandals as a frame through which to see the healthcare debate.
The focus on the strategy and the confusing coverage helped can help lead to a “spiral of cynicism” that can undermine American democracy. They wrote, “Press behaviors are making public deliberation more difficult at a time when the problems facing the country are increasingly complex.”
A few months after Agnew's speech, conservative Irving Kristol, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, added this note:
“The year 1909 was a critical moment in the history of medicine, for that was the year when the medical profession finally began to do, on balance, more good than harm to its patients. The profession of journalism, as it now declares itself to be, seems to me to be in its pre-1909 phase, and it is legitimate to wonder when it will begin to do more good than harm.”


Agnew's last point - he made it first - gets at the heart of the matter of bias. His point underscores a contrast between two views of the role of the press in a Republic: One perceived media role is one where media serve mainly as a conduit for information from government to citizens. The contrasting role is one where media act as an independent check on power. This contrast goes back to the nation's founding. Agnew clearly came out on the side of those who thought journalism should be a conduit of information.
“When the president completed his address - an address that he spent weeks in preparing - his words were subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism. … a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed in one way or another their hostility to what he had to say. …”

Agnew added:
“Every American has a right to disagree with the President of the United States, and to express publicly that disagreement.
“But the President of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds and for their own opinions about a Presidential address without having the President's words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested.”

Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist papers, seems to note the necessity of the role of the press in being a conduit of public information:
“What are the sources of information by which the people . . . must regulate their judgment of the conduct of their representatives in the State legislature? Of personal observation they can have no benefit. This is confined to the citizens on the spot. They must therefore depend on the information of intelligent men, in whom they confide; and how must these men obtain their information? Evidently from the complexion of public measures, from the public prints, from correspondences with their representatives, and with other persons who reside at the place of their deliberations.”

Agnew's letter to Dean Burch showed Agnew probably preferred this kind of reporting when he wrote that news should be a “straightforward report of the material actually presented.”
But Madison, writing in the Defense of the Virginia Resolutions in 1799, showed how important press freedom can be in effecting change in governance and in providing a check on abusive government power. He was arguing against the Sedition Act of John Adams' administration.
“Had Sedition Acts, forbidding every publication that might bring the constituted agents into contempt or disrepute, or that might excite the hatred of the people against the authors of unjust or pernicious measures, been uniformly enforced against the press, might not the United States have been languishing, at this day, under the infirmities of a sickly Confederation? Might they not, possibly, be miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke?”

It seemed that Agnew sensed the tension between these two views of the press. His call in his speech was for internal reforms in the press, not government censorship. (Indeed, nowhere in the Nixon papers of the period does anyone propose any kind of prior restraint or censorship despite other illegal acts in dealing with the press emerged.)
Agnew raised this powerful example:
“When Winston Churchill rallied public opinion to stay the course against Hitler's Germany, he did not have to contend with a gaggle of commentators raising doubts about whether he was reading public opinion right, or whether Britain had the stamina to see the war through.”

W. Lance Bennett at the University of Washington has regularly noted how most policy disputes reach the audience through the press in terms of how disputes are discussed within government. That is, those outside government and policy-making rarely have a voice in media agendas about policy. If so, Agnew's concern about network commentators was probably overwrought. Media mostly mimic those in power. This mimicry is a conservative bias in its way.
If so, is that such a bad thing?
Much of the recent media scholarship has been about the contested 2000 election. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and another colleague, Paul Waldman, argued that the press chose between the ways Bush framed the arguments about ballots and the ways Gore framed those arguments. They assert that most framed the issue as Bush framed the issue, implicitly leading to his victory in the end. Given Bush's high on-going approval ratings, his win is seen as legitimate to American voters.
Some may suggest that such media bias - Republican-tilted in this case - was a travesty for a just result in a democracy. The Marxists might suggest that this kind of institutional bias is hegemony - a tilt toward American elite power that overpowers other cultures and countries.
But there is another way to look at this kind of bias. Insofar as the press has a bias toward the American establishment, then it supports American rule of law. Imagine a dark scenario in January 2001. Imagine the press had adopted Gore's frame, that public opinion followed that frame, but legal issues spiraled in different ways such that Bush and Gore both showed up at the Capitol to receive the oath of office in January?
A case can be made that preserving an American system was, in the end, a positive purpose for the press. A story that legitimized the rule of law helped governance and stability. And if the press abetted the preservation of a system, there was no travesty in the framing of the election toward George W. Bush if the system were to endure.
In essence, Agnew looked a little into an abyss that suggested that the press could lead a society toward chaos by adopting frames that undermine that system. What if Hitler saw hypothetical criticism of Churchill and thought the British were as weak as they actually were in 1940 and, therefore, invaded Britain before taking on Russia. There might be a Third Reich today.
James Madison says the country's founding was about something more than just freedom:
“In framing [Madison uses framing the other way - as in constructing or building rather than viewing] a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; (emphasis is mine) and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Agnew's critique can cut both ways, however. Agnew may have seen much of the querulous criticism in today's conservative media establishment, although he probably never would have said so. Rush Limbaugh and George Gordon Liddy can now drown out a Democratic president on many issues, such that his views were never really understood by the public. The criticism from the right can make it nearly impossible for the government “to control the governed.”

So, are media liberal?
In fact, it depends not only on what you mean by media and what you mean by liberal; it depends on where you sit and on how you answer the question
For example:
Traditional media scholars have answered this question by counting the number of Republican vs. Democratic sources. One study at the University of Maryland in 2001 indicated that Republican sources outnumbered Democratic ones during the Florida election debate in 2000. Answer the question that way, and media are conservative.
Some early studies of media have seen relatively even coverage of major national candidates during election season. Answer questions that way, and media become relatively fair.
Still other studies look at how certain words are used. For example, one small study at the University of Maryland elaborated on earlier research on the coverage of abortion. It reiterates the broader scope of the work of writer David Shaw. In The New York Times, moderate as a word modifies Republican - moderate Republican - differently than it modifies Democrat. For a Democrat, moderate tends to imply a willingness to deviate from standard Democratic positions and to veer away from party leadership in a general sense. For Republicans, moderate is generally correlated with a pro-choice position on abortion. As such, a pro-life Republican would be an immoderate Republican. Answer the question that way, and media are liberal.
Quickly, as these contrasting examples show, the question of liberal media leads to answers filled with indefinite intellectual goo.
One study suggested that the public perception of media biased in a liberal direction is actually a result of the agenda-setting effect. Citizens tend to think media are liberal because media have been talking so much about the liberal media.
Finally, one scholar turns the whole question of media bias on its head. That media are biased implies they should be something else - objective or what Agnew called straightforward. But such an implication is in itself a bias. That media should actually be objective, apart from the political process, is a value judgment itself.
Defined this way, Agnew 's straightforward reporting would make him a liberal striving for objective reporting.
Political scientist Richard Reeb notes that the only alternatives to rule of the people in a democracy is one of either aristocracy or monarchy - theoretically wise leadership by those independent as much as possible of society. He suggests that the media have now sought to have this independent role of aristocrats placing themselves above the fray as the neutral observers. With that assumption, Reeb finds objectivity itself is a partisan cause.
He says, therefore, “a healthy political journalism should … assume the honorable burden of stating and defending [the assumptions and conclusions of their arguments].” For him, the truly conservative argument is one of open argument in a context of support for American systems because this support conserves union. Reeb's view is media exist within a system that protects them, and they must, therefore, support the system openly rather than act as if they exist outside it.
On the other hand, liberals sometimes discuss the need for more views within media, for creating a public sphere of discussion and discourse, as scholar Jurgen Habermas has stated. This mirror image of Reeb's argument would be for more diverse voices discussing democracy. Without such diversity, such press is too conservative.
To ask whether media are liberal, then, is really to ask the wrong question because any one answer means so little. The better questions: What effect can and should media have on a republic? How can media help preserve it? Taken at face value - as Agnew would have us do - the Vice President was asking those questions all along, and he was right to do so. As he said, the media still must seek better answers themselves.