BOOK REVIEW : Media Guide Tilts Toward the Right : REPAP 1990 MEDIA GUIDE: A Critical Review of the Media’s Recent Coverage of the World Political Economy<i> Edited by Jude Wanniski</i> Polyconomics/Repap Enterprises $19.95, paperback; 540 pages

The “Repap Media Guide,” now in its fifth edition, is not a guide to all the media. It deals overwhelmingly with print media. Only 10 of its 540 pages deal with broadcast media.

Nor is Repap a guide to all the print media. It deals only with American print media. The Canadian press is covered in eight pages. The British Press per se is not covered at all, although the Financial Times and The Economist are included.

Nor is it a guide to all the American print media. Newspapers are covered much more heavily than magazines, and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post more heavily than other newspapers. On Repap’s list of 90 “Highest Rated Journalists of 1989,” 45 come from those three newspapers.

Nor is it a guide even to all that those three newspapers do. The limitation concealed by its title is revealed by its subtitle: “A Critical Review of the Media’s Recent Coverage of the World Political Economy.”

Have you won a Pulitzer Prize for drama criticism? Don’t expect to find your name in Repap. The arts have no place here. Neither does cultural coverage in the broader sense. And neither, to name a more surprising omission in a guide with money and power on its mind, does science. The guide has something of the same labeling problem as one of Jude Wanniski’s books does. Titled “The Way the World Works,” that book turns out to be a primer in supply-side economics.

For one-third of its length, Repap is an “Overview of the Print Media” with separate entries on individual newspapers and magazines. As a brief statement of the state of each publication, the guide is clear, concise and informative. Any working journalist who had received a job offer from one of the listed publications could read the relevant entry and show up for an interview basically in the know.

For two-thirds of its length, however, Repap descends to personalities with a vengeance. It offers free-wheeling, tendentious capsule evaluations of the work of individual reporters and editors in the areas it cares most about; namely, “Commentators, Financial Reporters and Columnists, National Security/Diplomatic Correspondents and Social/Political Reporters.” Like restaurants, journalists in these categories are awarded one, two, three or four stars.

The markedly conservative slant of the editors means that reporters critical of the Bush Administration tend to be taxed as tendentious or--a favorite tag--”fashionable.” Writing of Joseph Lelyveld, whom it names as the likely next editor of the New York Times, Repap opines: “Lelyveld’s journalistic weakness, we suspect, is a personal commitment to ‘human rights,’ as he understands the term, in a way that may engage him emotionally.” Distressing indeed.

Reporters supportive of the Administration, by contrast, tend to be praised as objective and independent. Conservative journalists are, in general, watched a bit more closely than liberal ones are. Last year, observing that Michael Novak hadn’t written much lately, Repap ventured to hope that he might pick up the pace a bit in the coming year.

The most outspoken liberal journalists, however, never go unnoticed. Alexander Cockburn of The Nation receives three stars and an entry in which he is coyly praised for “the street fighter’s tendency to go for the most vulnerable spot of an opponent other than the jugular.” Hit ‘em high, hit ‘em low, hit ‘em where. . . .

Not all entries are animated by the editors’ conservative bias, but, in a way, most of the best entries are. The way to lose the Repap editors may not be to hold liberal views but, whatever your journalistic ability, to forgo immediately identifiable political plumage. Politics arouses Repap as nothing else.

It was Mike Wallace, if I recall correctly, who remarked after years of interviewing that interesting people talk about three things: politics, sex and religion. Repap, omitting the latter two, is energetic but narrow in the way that people who care only about money and power often are. Still, no one in or near the print media will fail to find something of interest in this volume, and people who find Capitol Hill and Wall Street the only really interesting parts of the country may find it the last media guide they’ll ever need.

I do not suggest any increase in Repap’s coverage of culture and the arts, since I doubt that the Polyconomics/Repap team could really do the job even if it tried. I do suggest, however, that even on its own terms, the guide could do a better job with science and technology.

It claims that the major stories of 1989 were “Communism’s Crackup and Crackdown,” “Drugs and Crime” and “Planet of the Year,” meaning environmentalism and, in particular, the Greenhouse Effect, on which, “taken as a whole, the news media did its worst work this year.” But if a science story can be judged one of the three stories of the year, why do science journalists not rate a category of their own in Repap?

The world political economy of Repap’s subtitle will change profoundly if the environment, the carrier of life, becomes the bringer of death. Next year, will Repap mock Earth Day as the non-story of the year, and will it again ignore science journalists as a group? One fears it will, but given the fact that this guide has, for the moment, no serious competition, one can only hope it won’t.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Lawyers and Thieves” by Roy Grutman and Bill Thomas.