The News Twisters

Edith Efron's The News Twisters was among the first books to compile conservative gripes about the "liberal media" into easily-digestible form. Efron, longtime writer for TV Guide, acolyte of Ayn Rand and ghostwriter for conservative politicians, published her look at the media's supposed bias in 1971, two years after Spiro Agnew began his imprecations against the media's "effete corps of impudent snobs" who were supposedly distorting Americans' views of events. Efron's meritricious arguments based on a highly idiosyncratic gauge of newscasts covering topics like the 1968 presidential campaign, the war in Vietnam, antiwar protests and the Black Power movement. Efron provides impressive-looking bar graphs claiming that the vast majority of journalists treated Hubert Humphrey favorably while scorning Nixon and largely ignoring George Wallace, but a reader isn't likely to be persuaded by this "analysis" without acccess to the news reports she's analyzing. Efron can charge that the media is unduly anti-conservative by reporting a speech where Humphrey attacks George Wallace supporters, for instance, then claim that reporters are pro-left by reporting a speech where Humphrey critiques the Radical Left. She complains that reporters didn't report violent or unruly protests against Nixon to make the protesters sympathetic. Then, in the same chapter, harps on an incident that was covered as exaggerated - presumably, so the nefarious Sam Donaldson could make the protesters seem more powerful than they were. Lack of internal consistency isn't Efron's only shortcoming: her gripe about coverage of the New Left consists of complaining that Dan Rather and David Brinkley don't explicitly identify antiwar protesters as "leftists" in every news report, as if anyone would doubt where Eldridge Cleaver and Abbie Hoffman fell on the political spectrum. …