MediaWatch: September 1991
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: September 1991
- Labeling Left and Right
- NewsBites: Clubbing Clearance
- Revolving Door: Free-Market Teaching from Dukakis?
- Reporters Undergo A "Liberation Conversion"
- More Attacks on Reagan, Bush, Conservatives
- More Pre-Coup Media Misinterpretations
- Janet Cooke Award: Satisfied Soviet People
Labeling Left and Right
The Soviet coup caused a surge in the adjective "right-wing" to describe hard-line communists. Formerly reserved for conservative Americans and Latin military dictators, the reporters and columnists at The Washington Post picked the term "right wing" to describe the coup plotters 11 times in the first five days of the coup. On August 22, reporter Fred Hiatt called them a "right-wing junta." But when reformers like Boris Yeltsin quit the Communist Party to form a new party last July 13, reporter Michael Dobbs dubbed it "left-wing."
Why? In her last-page Newsweek column on May 12, 1989, Post Editorial Page Editor Meg Greenfield suggested: "Every time there is a confrontation in the world, we manage to dub the good guys liberals and the bad guys conservatives and pretty soon that is the common currency."
But does Greenfield's argument extend to the slightly different ideological terms "right-wing" and "left-wing"? To find out, MediaWatch analysts reviewed every use of the terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" by Washington Post reporters in news stories during the year 1990. The study determined that "right-wing" and "left-wing" were mostly saved by Post reporters for bad guys -- terrorists, guerrillas, or politicians that reporters feel safe presenting as undesirable or extreme, such as the members of Germany's neo-Nazi Republican Party.
Applied to these terms, Greenfield's theory is at least half- correct: "right-wing" villains were plentiful. But left-wingers weren't good guys; they often didn't have a label at all. Post reporters used "right-wing" 394 times, but "left-wing" only 87 times, a ratio of about 9 to 2. When analysts studied "extreme" variants of these terms (such as "far right" and "extreme left"), Post reporters referred to the right 106 times, the left only 24.
Extremists bring out the labeling instinct in reporters, but the Post found most of its extremists on the right. Analysts calculated the number of mentions of "far right" (6), "extreme right" (30), "hard right" (3), "radical right" (1), "ultra-conservative" (7), "archconservative" (1), and "ultra-right" (2). On the opposite side, analysts added the labels for "far left" (7), "extreme left" (4), "hard left" (3), "radical left" (11), and "archliberal," "ultraliberal," and "ultra-left" (zero).
In fact, most designations of "right-wing" and "left-wing" are not applied in coverage of American politics, but in foreign stories. Out of 394 mentions of "right-wing," only 38 referred to the U.S. political scene. Post reporters described American liberals as "left-wing" only three times. But "radical left" appropriately accompanied four stories on the All Peoples' Congress, an affiliate of the Workers World Party, which supported the Tiananmen Square massacre. In U.S. stories, extreme right terms edged out extreme left terms, eight to seven. But the term "far left" appeared more often as an instruction in photo captions (19) than as a label in news stories (7).
By far, the largest number of labels come from Post coverage of Israel, written mostly by reporter Jackson Diehl. The Post applied the term "right-wing" 151 times, mostly to describe Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government. "Left-wing" appeared in 36 stories, mostly in reference to the opposition Labor Party. A similar contrast emerged in extreme terms: the Post tagged Israeli politicians as "far right" nine times and "extreme right" eight times, but never found anyone on the "far left" or "extreme left" in Israel, despite the radicalism of left-wing parties or the PLO.
In fact, Diehl reported a coming "narrow" right-wing coalition four times, and reporter Glenn Frankel explained what that meant: "Shamir will head a narrowly based government dependent for its survival on right-wing extremists and religious fundamentalists that will dramatically increase Jewish settlements and crack down harder on Palestinians -- moves that are likely to provoke more violence."
South Africa, reported primarily by David Ottaway ad Allister Sparks, came in second in the number of labels, but first in imbalance. The Post gave the "right-wing" label 71 times, but mentioned "left-wing" only once, and then to describe a white journalist. The African National Congress, often described as "the main anti-apartheid group," whose President posed for pictures with Fidel Castro, was never labeled.
On June 27, Ottaway reported that white right-wing leaders objected to negotiations with the "communist" ANC, with "communist" in quotes, despite its interlocking alliance with the South Africa Communist Party. But later in the same article, he cited "the growing militancy of extreme right-wing groups." Like Israel, Post reporters tossed the "far right" label 14 times, and "extreme right" four times, but never found anyone on the "extreme left" or "far left."
While Post reporters liked describing Soviet hard-liners as "right-wing" in the last month, only ten stories on the Soviet Union included the term last year, and used "left-wing" five times. The Post did once use "ultraconservative" to describe the anti-Semitic group Pamyat. But reporter David Remnick noted the problem of labeling on May 5, when he quoted Soviet legislator Ilya Zaslavski poking fun at Gorbachev adviser Alexander Yakovlev: "What does he mean by right-wing? I guess in the Western sense it is right-wing: pro-market, anti-communist. But here we call that left-wing, don't we?"
In her 1989 article, Meg Greenfield concluded: "My humble point is that in addition to new policies and initiatives, what this country sorely needs is a new political vocabulary and a revised political map." By that standard, the Post is already two years behind. Its reporters find "right-wing" an appropriate description not only for hard-line communists and staunch capitalists, but Israeli Zionists and Soviet anti-semites, apartheid-loving bigots and Clarence Thomas supporters. If the Post cannot define a proper label for the polar opposites on its "right," it should at east appropriately label its "left." Otherwise, they reinforce the suspicion that labels function as warnings to readers, and that the "right" is five times more worth fearing than the "left."
