TWO FROM ZNET

First, an essay on the so-called liberal media:

Media Infrastructure

Over the past quarter century, the conservatives/Republicans have built a huge, permanent media machine – a vertically integrated structure that puts out the conservative message on TV, with newspapers, through magazines, over radio stations, in books and via the Internet.

Through all these forms of communication, in large cities and small towns, the Right’s media is there for its listeners, readers and viewers every day, year round, not just during election cycles. Its impact is especially important in rural areas that don’t have easy access to the variety of media found in urban centers.

Indeed, the conservative media’s role in firming up rural America as a “red” Republican bastion is often overlooked. The incendiary rhetoric on conservative talk radio has been a major factor in convincing millions of these Americans that “liberals” are demons who hate their country and love killing babies.

Meanwhile, trying to position itself in the center, the mainstream or corporate media keeps tacking rightward to avoid offending conservatives, who aggressively trash individual reporters and news organizations if they are deemed to show any traces of liberalism.

Click here for the rest.

I pretty much accept as fact that the media are conservative on the whole, but it's good to remind oneself of exactly why that's the case given the conventional wisdom that the opposite is true. This Robert Parry essay (he's a reporter who "broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s") does as good of a job of doing that as any essay on the subject I've read. And it's short.

Next, another essay on the American "morals" myth:

60's Morality is Winning

In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance. We must be careful not to confuse election results with cultural trends.

As survey after survey of contemporary social attitudes demonstrates, social conservatives no more represent the mainstream or the future than Prohibitionists did in the 1920s. If anything, it's the baby-boom sensibility spawned in the 1960s that has become mainstream in America today. As conservative columnist George Will lamented a few years back, politics "seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the sixties sensibility."

And

There's a good reason why young people feel the way they do, and that's because their baby boomer parents overwhelmingly agree with them. So forget any talk of a generation gap between boomers and their children. On a wide range of social and cultural issues, they are united in their attitudes of tolerance and inclusiveness. The only generation gap that remains is the same one that began in the '60s, between pre- boomers and the rest of us. What we have today is a pre-baby boom cohort that's steadfastly conservative, with the vast majority of everyone younger leaning the opposite way.

And

And why do social conservatives loom so large in our politics today? The best historical parallel for them may be the Luddites who terrorized Britain two centuries ago, the workers who traveled around the country smashing machines for fear that the Industrial Revolution would destroy their jobs and way of life. They were loud, and their tenacity gave the impression that they represented more Britons than they actually did, when in fact they were merely acting out their despair and outrage at a world that was passing them by. Today's social conservatives are our cultural Luddites.

Click here for the rest.

I find this essay to be much more persuasive than the New York Times essay which dealt mostly with media culture that I posted a while back. Younger people are more tolerant on the whole, and it strikes me that this conservative, witch-hunting era may very well be over soon, perhaps in less than a couple of decades. When I think about how people seemed to be so liberal back when I was a kid in the 1970s, it drives me mad seeing how attitudes seem to be so insanely conservative now. Could all this insanity simply be a last, desperate gasp of conservative reaction to the great social changes of the 20th century? That when the older generation passes on, political sanity will prevail, and I will no longer have to mourn for my country?

Every day, I'm finding more and more good reasons to be optimistic.

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