APPARENTLY DOESN'T THINK SO.

BY ERIC ALTERMAN | Few things in life are more annoying than right-wingers complaining about "leftist bias" in the media. The folks who run General Electric, Westinghouse, Disney and Rupert Murdoch's Evil Empire do not curl up at night with Angela Davis or Noam Chomsky. Even more infuriating, though, is a right-winger with a genuine complaint against media mega-corporations who confuses his argument -- and weakens his case -- by flogging this dead, imaginary, horse.

Robert Zelnick, a 21-year veteran of ABC News, is one such annoying individual. Zelnick was recently forced out of his job as a Washington correspondent because he refused to drop plans to publish a biography of Al Gore. Zelnick had been working on the book, with his boss's permission, while on sabbatical from the network. He hired a research assistant and took a few trips to poke around Carthage, Tenn. Just as he was getting ready to finish it and return to his old job, however, Roone Arledge and David Westin, the network's top two executives, informed him that he had to choose between being a reporter and being an author. "We cannot have a Washington correspondent writing a book about one of our national leaders whom that correspondent will undoubtedly have to cover," they explained. Zelnick, who had already invested considerable time and expense in the project, resigned.

ABC explains that it had already been planning to fire Zelnick, which was why it gave him permission in the first place. ABC did not think it fair to tell him no and then fire him anyway. But ABC executives changed their mind about the firing, and only then realized they were facing a conflict-of-interest problem. "We were trying to be nice to the man," said Richard C. Wald, senior vice president of ABC News. But, added ABC News President David Westin, giving Zelnick permission to work on the book was a "mistake" for which the network was "genuinely sorry." "To paraphrase (Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell) Holmes," Westin told Zelnick, "you have a constitutional right to say whatever you like, but you don't have a constitutional right to be an ABC News correspondent."

Zelnick quit in a huff, which was probably a big mistake. Though he insists that he has uncovered important new facts about Gore's life, his book will be hard to take seriously, arriving as it will with the imprimatur of the Regnery publishing company (which also published an earlier Zelnick book, "Backfire: A Reporter's Look at Affirmative Action"), whose commitment to truth is frequently at odds with its passion for right-wing sleaze. (See Gary Aldrich and R. Emmett Tyrrell.)

Unfortunately, Zelnick's defense, mounted from Stanford's conservative Hoover Institute, has been myopic and ham-handed. In a deeply self-important op-ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal, he argued that he had been silenced by a liberal conspiracy that allows that brilliant left-winger Sam Donaldson to mouth off at will, while poor Robert is silenced because of the brave iconoclasm of his conservative views. In fact, the best argument for Donaldson is that he is a plant for the other side, designed to make liberals seem stupid, inconsequential and full of themselves -- kind of a reverse version of David Horowitz.

But none of these details detract from the essential facts of the case. The idea that reporters cannot be allowed to write books about the subjects they cover is strange indeed. Has ABC News ever heard of Bob Woodward or David Maraniss, both of the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who have done just that? I once read a novel co-authored by Ted Koppel dealing with matters of national security and featuring a thinly disguised Henry Kissinger. Is Ted next on ABC's chopping block?

Zelnick's work as a correspondent should be judged purely on its own merit. If it is overly infected by right-wing bias, in the opinion of his superiors, then by all means they should fire him. It is a bad day for the First Amendment when one of America's most important news organizations forces a reporter to choose between being a reporter and being a reporter.

Actually, it has been a bad few days for the First Amendment altogether. The most prominent abuser has been Ken Starr, who invoked it while trampling on it with his knuckleheaded subpoena of Sidney Blumenthal. An even worse offender, however, is Rupert Murdoch, who this week cravenly pandered to China's tyrants by ordering his HarperCollins Publishers to kill a book by Chris Patten, the outspoken former governor of Hong Kong. Murdoch, who piously invokes the free press to justify the trash he publishes in the New York Post and elsewhere, dropped to his knees, Lewinsky-style, when Beijing decided it would prefer that its abysmal human rights record not be aired. (The book will now be published by Times Books.)

When I interviewed Murdoch on the subject of freedom in China not long ago, he was full of praise for the progress being made there. Previously, he had tried to pose as a free speech champion, saying that communications technology represented an "unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere." When the Chinese started to take him seriously, however, he reversed himself. More recently, Murdoch has lectured his adopted American countrymen on the practical virtues of authoritarianism. He has since consistently caved in to China whenever the opportunity presented itself -- going so far as to boot the BBC off Hong Kong-based Star TV when the Chinese complained about a BBC documentary on Mao that hadn't even appeared on Star TV. As with the Patten incident, Mao himself could hardly have handled the matter more efficiently. Given the left-wing bias of the network news, it's no accident that a commie-lover like Murdoch is probably the most powerful man in the business.
SALON | March 5, 1998

Eric Alterman is media columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming "Nobody Asked Me: The American People and American Power."