All the Book Reviews Fit to Print

Books are a relatively open avenue to dissent in the United States. Critical voices of the left are rarely heard on TV or in the leading news magazines and dominant newspapers, and never at the length (or with the repetitions) necessary to overcome audience unfamiliarity and cognitive dissonance. Left-of-center books, by contrast, are published frequently, and their length allows their unfamiliar ideas to be spelled out in detail. The catch, of course, is that most left books are issued by small publishers and have tiny sales and small audiences, and the more radical the book's themes the smaller the audience is likely to be.

Left books are tolerated by the establishment and right wing because their marginal existence poses a minimal threat to the hegemony of the conservatively correct, while serving to demonstrate the “openness” of society. This tolerance is in marked contrast with the treatment of critical thoughts that occasionally surface in the mainstream media, which are a matter of more serious concern and elicit action from business, politicians, and the flak machines. After the New York Times removed Raymond Bonner from his reportorial post in Central America in 1981, under pressure from the Reagan administration and organized right wing, he published a very good book on El Salvador, Weakness and Deceit (1984), under a Times Books imprimatur. As a reporter Bonner had reached a million readers, with repeated messages, and was under steady attack. His book sales were very likely under a 20th of the news readership, and in this less threatening mode he could be (and was) ignored.

Systemic Bias in Book Reviews

One reason why even the best of left books tend to have tiny audiences is that left authors are not well known, as few of them have been on TV, for political reasons, and mass audience book buying seems to be an almost Pavlovian response to the number of TV appearances and press accounts, which is why books by David Brinkley, Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, or about Princess Diana or others on continuous display, start out with sales in six figures. Brokaw's NBC network kindly allowed him to explore the themes of his new book, The Greatest Generation, both in a documentary on “Dateline” and in a profile on the “NBC Nightly News,” after which “his publisher went back to press for 100,000 more copies, bringing the total in print to 1.48 million” (NYT, January 25, 1999).

Another factor is that left books often have painful and upsetting themes that elite audiences don't like to confront. Stephen Steinberg's Turning Back (1995) focuses on the continued institutional power of racism and The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (the book's subtitle); Phyllis Bennis's Calling the Shots (1996) describes and assails U.S. domination and manipulation of the United Nations; and Audrey and George Kahin's Subversion as Foreign Policy (1995) uses the word “subversion” to refer to U.S. policy toward Indonesia. Many of the saleable “serious” books tend to reassure, like Alan Wolfe's One Nation, After All (1998), Gregg Easterbrook's Moment on Earth (1995), and Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism (1996), or they describe abuses and threats by “proper” villains like enemy states, communists, radicals, overzealous regulators, criminals, and unbelievers. Important examples of the so-called proper villain genre are the various assaults on Islam (Kanan Makiya's Cruelty and Silence [1993], Judith Miller's God Has Ninety-Nine Names [1993]), or multiculturalism (Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education [1991]), or government regulation (Philip K. Howard's Death of Common Sense [1996]), or foreign leftists (Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 [1993]).

A third factor is that books with reassuring themes and acceptable villains that feed into accepted biases, and especially the biases of the dominant elites, will attract mainstream publisher interest and a supportive corporate media. Publishers like such books for both ideological reasons and anticipation of a receptive audience and large sales. Mainstream media book review attention tends to reflect the same elite pattern of preferences. For example, Susan Faludi showed compellingly in Backlash (1991) the media's consistent proclivity to latch on to each study claiming damage to women and the family allegedly resulting from feminist extremism and influence, no matter how implausible the claims and unscientific the study. Refutations and analyses with findings supportive of feminist positions have been systematically downplayed or ignored altogether. As another example, Alan Friedman's Spider's Web (1993), subtitled “The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq,” was given short shrift in the mainstream media, possibly because Friedman's theme was inconvenient to an elite that pretends horror at the thought of Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction.”

A fourth factor is the power of major publishers, who put out many books and have large advertising budgets. Their relationship to newspaper and magazine publishers and book review editors is based on their economic importance, reciprocal interests, and sometimes secondary economic links via conglomerate ownership and business connections. Increasingly these publishers have linked up with other media entities, as Random House did with Brokaw and NBC (and also with Peter Jennings and ABC), and even with toy manufacturers (Mattel/HarperCollins) and soft drink producers (Coca Cola/HarperCollins) for cross-promotional deals. These large publishers, and their massive advertising, gravitate toward how-to-do-it, cooking and travel books; works by and about celebrities; and fiction blockbusters. They eschew serious and subtle institutional critiques. Bertelsmann canceled a contract for a critical biography of Walt Disney apparently based on the threat to a business relationship between Bantam, a Bertelsmann subsidiary, and the Disney company. Such links may be symbiotic in the same way as those of major news sources and media often are, and the leverage and need to placate the partner may affect policy, obviously favoring the big boys over small and left-of-center publications.

An underrated fifth factor is that books with system-supportive themes regularly obtain financial support from right-wing foundations, think tanks, affluent individuals, and publishers, that are unavailable to leftists. Charles Murray got a $100,000 grant from Richard Mellon Scaife to help him work on his anti-welfare classic Losing Ground (1984); anti-feminist hatchet person Christina Hoff Sommers got at least $164,000 from the right-wing Olin, Bradley and Carthage foundations in the early 1990s, plus a reported six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster, to write her Who Stole Feminism? (1994); Dinesh D'Souza got $150,000 from the Olin Foundation to write Illiberal Education, and support from the corporate-funded American Enterprise Institute to work on his racist tome The End of Racism; and Claire Sterling was generously financed by the Readers Digest in working on the KGB-Bulgarian Connection to the 1981 shooting of the pope.

This lavish funding reflects the deliberate corporate and right wing effort to alter the intellectual climate by underwriting the production and dissemination of proper thoughts, and places like the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, and Heritage Foundation have huge budgets—$18.6 million, $22.3 million, and $25.9 million, respectively, in 1997—to provide rest, rehabilitation, and writing time to the likes of Michael Novak, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ed Meese, Julian Simon, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Dinesh D'Souza. These institutions also push the writings of these proper thinkers with advertising and publicity, sponsored book tours, the distribution of Op Ed columns, arranging TV and talk show appearances, and by generous donations of their books to libraries and schools. The money spent spurs sales.

Radicals, by contrast, have tiny grants and advances, if any, and their publishers are usually small and with limited resources for publicity. This results in a tiering of book advertising and publicity, with left (and many other scholarly and specialized) books advertised, if at all, in politically sympathetic or specialized journals of small circulation. With rare exception, small and radical publishers cannot afford to advertise in the New York Times or Newsweek. (The typical book ad budget for small publishers like Beacon, South End Press, and Routledge would not pay for a single half-page ad in the New York Times Book Review.)

This tiering, based in part on the differential availability of financial backing, feeds into book review policy. Where a book is made familiar to a large audience by publicity and news coverage, as in the case of The Bell Curve, audience interest and a desire to be current and useful virtually compels reviews. This reviewing bias is reinforced by propaganda over time that produces a general interest and receptivity.

This systemic element even affects left-of-center publications, whose editors often feel the need to review the well-promoted system-supportive books to meet reader interest and display topicality, although usually giving them less friendly treatment than the mainstream media. Even when a book like D'Souza's End of Racism is reviewed harshly, however, the author and publisher are served by the attention, which is given at the cost of neglecting better books that the system marginalizes. The Wall Street Journal, by contrast, is more political—it consistently reviews the books that meet its right-wing ideological standards, partly to push them, partly to alert readers to the availability of these meritorious works.

As many powerful critical works are of little interest to the publishing majors, and end up with small and university presses, the policy of the Times and other media that push them to the margins as a class, reinforces editorial and advertiser bias toward reviewing conventional, conservative, and block- busting books. The Times, for example, has occasional special segments on university press publications, which it substitutes for treating them individually and with the weight that each of them deserves. Small publishers with tiny ad budgets, like Verso, Monthly Review, Common Courage, and Seven Stories are rarely given reviews that reflect book quality or salience, and are commonly ignored altogether. The Times also rarely if ever treats publications by Amnesty International or other human rights groups as books, leaving them for notice—if any—as “news.” Thus, extremely illuminating university press books like Jan Black's United States Penetration of Brazil (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), Piero Gleijeses's The Dominican Crisis (Johns Hopkins, 1978), and Lars Schoultz's Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (Princeton, 1981), were ignored by the Times, as were shattering human rights documents such as AI's Report on Torture (1974), Disappearances: A Work Book (1981), and Guatemala: Government by Political Murder (1980).

Among the outstanding small press volumes not reviewed were Reed Brody's Contra Terror In Nicaragua (South End, 1985), Saul Landau's The Dangerous Doctrine (Institute for Policy Studies, 1988), Peter Kornbluh's Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (IPS, 1987), Holly Sklar's Washington's War On Nicaragua (South End, 1988), Carlos Vilas's Between Earthquakes and Volcanoes (Monthly Review, 1995), Duncan Green's Silent Revolution (Cassell 1995), and John Ross's The Annexation of Mexico (Common Courage, 1998). All of these put U.S. policy in Latin America in a highly unfavorable light, so that their exclusion from book review purview served the ongoing national foreign policy supported in the Times news and editorial departments by shrinking and skewing the “public sphere.”

Book review editors are not often chosen to rock the boat, and institutional constraints add to the likelihood that they will accept and internalize the dominant biases and allow reviews to reflect dominant market forces (manifested in part by the size of ad budgets). They do have some discretion, however, and may within limits depart from mainstream bias, countering it, magnifying it, or adding their own (or their paper's). Book review bias is therefore a complex mixture of the larger systemic element and the local addition (or subtraction).

The local element in bias will reflect the media institution's “policy” on certain topics, and to a degree the editor's own preferences. In the case of the New York Times, for example, the owners' and management's Cold War and anti-communist biases, negative attitude toward the dissidents of the 1960s, and strong support of Israel, has long affected every aspect of the paper's treatment of those subjects, as described in “All the News Fit to Print: The Cold War” (Z, May 1998) and in Part II. On the other hand, the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) editor during the 1980s and early 1990s, Rebecca Sinkler, was a feminist, and this and other factors caused the NYTBR to treat feminist and anti-feminist works with exceptional evenhandedness. It is true that Roiphe's The Morning After (1993) was accorded more generous treatment than Faludi's vastly superior Backlash, but by and large Roiphe, Sommers, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Camille Paglia were reviewed critically and were not given the elevated status they received in say U.S. News and World Report or Newsweek. However, it is evidence of the power of the right that the flak generated by a negative review of Sommers's Who Stole Feminism?, with strident accusations of reviewer bias, was one of the most severe during Sinkler's tenure as book review editor. The critique that follows here, which is offered only as an essay focusing on the New York Times, rests on principles that are acknowledged by most book review editors. That is, they claim to do more than merely evaluate potential best-sellers. They purport to manage a kind of public service operation, in which books of genuine social and political significance are given appropriate attention and evaluated fairly. In consequence, we can test editorial performance and bias by examining how they treated books of real salience to major public issues, or how they may have inflated the merits of unworthy books serving a special interest or propaganda role. We can also observe how adequately and fairly they handled books on a given topic as between critical works and those conveying system-supportive or conventional-apologetic messages. Admittedly, it will sometimes be hard to separate out systemic and local editorial bias and the critique will often be addressing the two working in tandem. It is also exceedingly difficult to determine which books should have been reviewed on a given topic; subjective judgments are inescapable and readers must decide for themselves whether the judgments made here are well grounded.

The broad hypotheses to be tested here are: first, that book review policy is related to overall editorial and news policy, which will reflect both systemic and local biases. Second, books with a seriously critical message from the left, which attack the ends as well as the tactics of policies supported by the dominant establishment, will tend to be ignored or treated with hostile bias. The degree of hostility will depend in part on the extent of elite agreement on an issue. Thus, when the elite is unified, left critiques will do less well than when elite disagreement creates some space. Third, books that comport with establishment positions, including those that support or attack them from the right, will tend to be treated generously, even when of low intellectual quality. Book review hostility and support will be displayed not merely in choosing to review or ignore, but also in placement and size of review, accompanying headings and photos, and of course the choice of reviewer and nature of the review.

It should be recognized from the start that the Times book review system is by no means wholly closed and that left-of-center books and those harshly critical of U.S. policy or U.S. allies are sometimes reviewed—even favorably, as in the cases of George Kahin's Intervention (1986), Bruce Franklin's M.I.A. or Mythmaking In America (1992), Joan Dassin's Torture in Brazil (1986), John Simpson's and Jana Bennet's The Disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza (1985), and even Edward Tivnan's The Lobby (1987), which criticizes one of the paper's most sacred cows. However, such surprises and deviations are rare, and are never featured heavily, as Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve or Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial (1984) were, and being very infrequent, do not alter the fact that the general thrust of the paper's reviews conforms to expectations and that the hypotheses to be tested here are well supported, as we shall see.

The New York Times reviews books both in the daily and Sunday edition, and each has its own person in charge. These book review editors have the considerable autonomy normally accorded professionals. But the selection of book review editor is itself a political act made by the top executives of the paper that pre-defines the tendency of book review choices. Thus the selection of Richard Bernstein—one of the pioneers in stoking the political correctness frenzy of 1991, author of the right wing favorite Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future (1994), and a very political reporter—as daily book review critic in April 1995, was a knowing decision to impart a right wing slant to the daily reviews. The resultant steady flow of reviews of politically congenial works was surely unsurprising.

Beyond this, the correlation between editorial, news, and book review policy has often been conspicuous and provides strong circumstantial evidence that the wall between the various components of the paper is porous. For example, during the years when the alleged Bulgarian-KGB assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981 was hot news (1982-86), the Times editorialized in favor of the link, selected its news accounts to support the claim, gave Claire Sterling—the leading proponent of the plot—front page space as a news reporter to provide an exceptionally misleading story about the case, and reviewed her book on the plot, The Time of The Assassins (1983) in both the daily and Sunday paper. Another book supporting the case, The Plot To Kill The Pope (1983), by former CIA propaganda official Paul Henze, was also reviewed in the NYTBR. When this writer (with Frank Brodhead) published a book critical of the case, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (1986), whose main themes have been vindicated by history, the paper ignored it. The integration of Times editorial, news, and book review policy was complete.

The Times regularly latches on to favorites, like Sterling, and accords them generous treatment across the wall. This applies, among others, to Cynthia Ozick, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Richard Perle, Steven Emerson, Tony Judt, Sam Tanenhaus, Gerald Posner, Alan Wolfe, and Maria Vargas Llosa. The political basis of the choice of favorites (or unfavorites, like Lillian Hellman and Oliver Stone) is clear. A recent Times reviewer of Vargas Llosa's Making Waves observed that the writer had “veered to the right” in the 1980s, which did not “endear Vargas Llosa to his former comrades in letters.” The reviewer failed to note, however, that the veering did endear the author to the New York Times, which treated him to lavish attention in all phases of the paper's operations. From 1983 to the present the Times ran 11 articles under Vargas Llosa's byline, profiled or interviewed him 8 times, and reviewed 13 of his books, several in both the daily and Sunday paper. He was even given space for a very long article assailing the Sandinistas (April 28, 1985), a task for which his “veering to the right” fitted him admirably (while ruling out other noted Latinos like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Eduardo Galeano).

The Times' French favorites are worthy of special note, because the bias displayed at all levels in the paper's dealing with France has been gross to the point of caricature. Times editors and news reporters have long treated that country snidely, France not being as amenable an ally as Thatcher's and Blair's Britain, nor as willing to move to a neoliberal world (as a sample of Times titles: Roger Cohen, “France Tells U.S., ‘I Oppose, Therefore I Am'” [January 30, 1994]; Cohen, “France's Allegiance To Things French, Like Hypocrisy” [August 24, 1997]; Craig Whitney, “Liberte, Egalite And Utter Gridlock” [December 10, 1995]; Cohen, “For France, Sagging Self-Image and Esprit” [February 11, 1997]; Eugen Weber, “What's Ailing France Now?” [April 2, 1998]). Amusingly, each Times reporter in France automatically gravitates to and interviews or writes glowing accounts of the “new philosopher,” and self-promoting blowhard, Bernard-Henri Levy, who made the momentous discovery of a Soviet Gulag and western virtue in the 1970s (see Flora Lewis, July 21, 1977; Richard Bernstein, April 2, 1987; Roger Cohen, December 13, 1992; Alan Riding, May 26, 1994, among others); and Levy's books and documentaries have received correspondingly generous treatment (five reviews, numerous positive mentions).

Earlier, the French cold warrior Raymond Aron was treated with similar warmth and his books were duly reviewed. A third worthy Frenchperson is Jean Francois Revel, author of Without Marx Or Jesus (1972), The Totalitarian Temptation (1977), How Democracies Perish (1983), Flight From Truth (1991), and Democracy Against Itself (1993). Revel's only notable characteristics are that he is passionately pro-U.S. and anti-left; his books are intellectually vacuous. But he is a Times Frenchperson of choice, and all five of his books have been accorded reviews. One of my favorite issues of the NYTBR—that of December 9, 1984—had a flattering review of Revel's How Democracies Perish by British Labour Party turncoat David Owen, with a photo and supplementary flattering note by Richard Bernstein, who referred to Revel as “unfashionably pro-American.” This issue of the NYTBR also had a positive review by Aaron Wildavsky of Freedom With Justice, by Michael Novak, the American Enterprise Institute's religious philosopher, this also accompanied by a photo of Novak along with a brief history of his traversal from left to right by Robert Pear.

In contrast with these worthies, the Times is less friendly to home folks like Herbert Schiller and Noam Chomsky, and the unfriendliness extends to editorial and news as well as books. Schiller, who is world renowned and perhaps the leading U.S. media critic of the left, has never had a book reviewed in the Times or an opinion column in the paper. His classic Mass Communication and American Empire (1969, updated in 1992), harshly critical of U.S. policy, also differed from Revel's work in mobilizing many little known facts and advancing an original analysis. The themes of his book Culture, Inc. (1989), were sharply at odds with the views of Richard Bernstein who dominates and threatens culture. As in the case of Chomsky, Schiller provides a powerful alternative perspective on the issues addressed, so that keeping both of them from public view fits the same agenda as giving substantial space to a Revel.

Chomsky has had a number of books reviewed in the Times over the past 30 years, but neither his remarkable study of Middle East issues The Fateful Triangle (1983), nor any of his four major political writings of the past decade (Necessary Illusions, Year 501, Deterring Democracy, and World Orders Old And New) were reviewed. He has never had an Op Ed column in the paper (although in 1972 the editors ran some paragraphs of his testimony on the Vietnam war given before a senate committee).

An underrated form of Times book review bias, and one that also displays a porous Chinese wall, is that accorded Times staff. Books by Gina Kolata, Michael Gordon, Henry Kamm, David Shipler, David Binder, Barbara Crossette, Peter Passell, Sylvia Nasar, Joseph Lelyveld, Judith Miller, and others are regularly reviewed, and while some of these books may be worthy the overall pattern strongly suggests preferential treatment. For example, on political correctness and the culture wars, the Times reviewed favorably Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue, but ignored the important critical works by John Wilson (The Myth of Political Correctness [1995] and Herbert Schiller [Culture, Inc.]). Current reporter Michael Gordon's and former reporter Bernard Trainor's book on the Persian Gulf war, The General's War (1995) was reviewed favorably in both the daily and Sunday papers; and Times reporter Roger Cohen's and Claudio Gatti's biography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, In the Eye of the Storm (1991), as well as Judith Miller's and Laurie Mylroie's Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990) were also given positive reviews. But superior and critical books on the war like Hamid Mowlana's, George Gerbner's and Herbert Schiller's Triumph of the Image (1992), and Douglas Kellner's The Persian Gulf TV War (1992), were ignored.

On the Central American wars, Times insiders Stephen Kinzer's Blood of Brothers (1984) and Shirley Christian's Revolution in the Family (1985) were each given two friendly reviews, and Clifford Krauss's Inside Central America (1991) was also reviewed, but seriously critical books were ignored: in addition to those named earlier, the paper never reviewed Richard White's The Morass (1984), Edward Herman's and Frank Brodhead's Demonstration Elections (1984), Michael McClintock's two-volume The American Connection (1985), and Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh's Low Intensity Warfare (1988). Even Penny Lernoux's moving and well documented Cry of the People (1980) was unreviewed, although the paper did list it as an outstanding work of non-fiction. Perhaps the book's subtitle—“United States Involvement in the Rise of Fascism, Torture, and Murder and the Persecution of the Catholic Church in Latin America”—was more than the editors could tolerate.

Of course the insiders' books tend to fit the political biases of the editors, which makes it easier to give them the preferences they received. In fact, the same reporters whose books are reviewed by the Times also do a great deal of the reviewing of other people's books in the same field, so that the wall is breached and a common perspective is realized by this route as well.                                        Z