Cast your vote – who is more ‘in the bubble’ – George W. or Newsweek?

“Bush’s World,” reads the front cover of this week’s Newsweek. “The Isolated President: Can He Change.”

Hilarious, really.

Of course the president is isolated what with every nutcake terrorist here and abroad that would love to place flying lead in his cranium. Of course Mr. Bush is isolated – insomuch that he doesn’t read the editorials of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Of course W. is out of touch, when a steady diet of talking heads on television would only serve to place fruitless ideas of highly partisan flaks to his cognition.

But the funniest part of all of this is that two self-important writers from the media elite - Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe of Newsweek - think that someone else – anybody else! – is “isolated” from the rest of the world. These are the same kind of guys who wonder where all these “red states” came from. And how the rest of the country can be so backward on issues like homosexual rights, full-blown abortion-on-demand, guns, traditional values and paying less to the federal government to do jobs they don’t want the federal government to do.

Maybe this president is isolated, and maybe, as the authors suggest, more than ever before in the history of the presidency. So? Effectiveness does not lie in focus groups and talking to people who leak and taking Truman-esque strolls across D.C.
But let’s just say it does, and then lets apply the same standard to the media.

The Lichter, Rothman and Lichter studies began back in the 1980’s to take the “balanced” façade off the national media. They interviewed, it will be remembered by some, 238 journalists from the entire spectrum of mass media including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS and asked them questions about their background and beliefs.

The research is old but the reality lives. Guess what? The media elite were liberals. A healthy majority even admitted it; even more admitted it of their colleagues. Half had no religious affiliation at all; only 8 percent attended church or synagogue weekly. Just 17 percent placed themselves on the conservative right of the political spectrum. Only 9 percent were convinced that homosexuality was morally wrong. Fifty-four percent saw nothing wrong with adultery; only 15 percent "strongly agreed" that extra-marital affairs were wrong. Ninety percent believed a woman should have a right to an abortion.

These were the people controlling the news flow of the nation. And that was just the start of such a raw look at our friends in the media centers of the nation. Every indices since seem to indicate much the same. Said CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg much later in 1996: “No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.”

And such a left-of-center bent to the news, as well as a Newsweek cover that touts an out-of-touch president, does indeed come naturally to reporters, writers and editorialists. They are at least as “bubbled” as the president they mock. Oh, certainly, they don’t think they are, but recast your eyes on the statistics, know that they haven’t changed much across two and a half decades and then remember that in their own minds they are the middle of mainstream.

Can he change? I don’t know about the president, but those writing about his tenure in office from the offices of periodicals like Newsweek, well, don’t expect ideological repentance any time soon.