Giving the readers their say.

Don't ask for reader e-mail unless you want it. In bales.

In my two preceding pieces about media bias, I invited readers to hurl dead cats or bonbons at me. My first installment, an overview of media bias and its history, generated 150-plus e-mails. I got as many bonbons as dead cats, but dead cats make better reading. So here they are.

Dozens of readers on the left and right insist I shutter my series until I define left and right. Hans H. Coucheron-Aamot captures this point of view best, writing:

In the past, it was common to call anything you did not like "socialist," which then segued over to "liberal," though these terms are not at all related. ... Today, the "chattering classes" tend to use "conservative" as a catch-all term for anything they dislike and do not approve of.

John May essayed on this theme as well, criticizing me for "perpetuat[ing] the delusion that the political universe is bi-polar, with all the players (and policy positions) stationed somewhere between the 'left' and the 'right.' "

Snuggling up with this particular dead cat, I plead guilty on both counts, but I ask for the court's leniency. Just because there's no satisfying definition of right and left or conservative and liberal doesn't prevent critics from complaining about right and left "media bias." If we're going to talk about what the media critics are talking about, we have to accept their obviously limited and fuzzy definitions. Reader John May is further correct to describe the cleaving of all politics, no matter what the substance, into left and right as a kind of bias. It allows the speaker to "seemingly illuminate the essential character of parties around the world ('left-wing,' 'center-right,' 'far-right') without describing (or knowing) their programs," May writes. The sin of bifurcation is ameliorated, I believe, when the political shorthand doesn't distort the positions and programs described. If May doesn't find much difference between what most folks call left and right, my bet is that he's a Naderite, too.

Most political debates ultimately collapse into a "for" or "against" proposition, and that's no more binary than left and right. For better or worse, we're stuck with the terms "left" and "right," but I'm happy to adopt a new, better shorthand if one exists. Tom Burke explains how left and right critics talk past one another because they "focus on different aspects of media organization." He continues:

Left critiques often go to the structure of media ownership and imply that a whole set of concerns—about the effects of corporate concentration, big business influence over foreign policy, and business-created environmental hazards—are underreported because of the influence of owners and the corporate structure itself. Right critiques tend to zero in on the ideology of reporters and editors in elite media outlets and tend to focus on how coverage is pitched, rather than on "missing stories."

Many readers urge me to give the views of Noam Chomsky an airing. (One reader accuses me of excluding Chomsky because any discussion of his views would harm the interests of Slate's owner, Microsoft. We'll see about that!) Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988) offers a "propaganda model" for understanding news media. In the Chomsky view, the media self-censors to placate and advance the interests of the state, corporations, and other powerful institutions. Chomsky says four sets of news "filters" are used in the production of the propaganda that masquerades as news: capitalist ownership, advertiser support, "flak" (the disciplining of errant voices), and "anti-communism" as the state religion. Arguing with Chomsky is a little like wrasslin' a blob of mercury. When you give him an example of press coverage that runs against the state or corporate interests, he'll respond that the mass media is not monolithic because the powerful interests don't agree on every score. He also believes the powerful interests will permit a mini-debate, but they'll stifle the volume of words that might harm the rich and powerful's interests.

I'm not persuaded by Chomsky's propaganda model. And, apparently, neither is the current leading media critic on the left, Eric Alterman. Alterman's new book, What Liberal Media?, makes no mention of the professor's work in its 322 pages. (The index does cite the work of "Edward R. Herman" on pages 48 and 49; I'm not sure if the "R" is a typo and meant to be "S.") The implausible Chomskyite comeback, I'm sure, is that Alterman's MSNBC part-time pay-masters—General Electric and Microsoft—forbid him from discussing such radical works. Chomsky's supporters won't take these words kindly, so I welcome additional correspondence from them.