THE SO-CALLED LIBERAL MEDIA

There are two dominant strains of mainstream media criticism convincingly demonstrating that the news has a conservative bias rather than the popularly believed but non-existent liberal bias. The first of these lines of criticism is an institutional analysis of the media, originally put together by Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. The long and the short of this argument is that the news media are owned by corporations and reporting tends to reflect a pro-corporate, pro-government point of view--the book uses countless case studies to essentially prove beyond any reasonable doubt that this is true. The second line of criticism is messier, virtually all case study, trying to illustrate on a point by point basis that the media favors conservative views over liberal views, without the clean overview of corporate structure provided by Chomsky and Hermann. Despite it's down and dirty, street fighting approach, this second strain of criticism is also compelling: the massive piles of evidence dug up on a daily basis by bloggers, left-wing journalists, and progressive media watchdog organizations make it quite clear that the media are, indeed, conservative.

One of the superstars of this second strain of criticism is Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?, a great book, much less dry than Chomsky and Hermann's academic language in Manufacturing Consent. Anyway, the point to this brief diatribe is that Alterman often likes to go out in the streets to rough up some right-wing toughs. Here's a bit from his latest:

A second technique is more often deployed on network television, where such naked partisanship is frowned upon, but executives are, if anything, even more worried about appearing unsympathetic to the red-state, red-meat offerings of George W. Bush. This is to ignore the substance and focus on the spectacle, the "feelings" and the atmosphere. CBS's Bob Schieffer, on his best post-Dan Rather behavior, for instance, marveled, "One of the best-delivered speeches that I have heard President Bush make. He was confident, he was direct, he drove his points home."

On ABC, Cokie Roberts found herself enthralled with a faux-dramatic--and most likely fully staged--embrace between an Iraqi woman seated next to Laura Bush and the mother of a soldier who died for Bush's folly in Falluja, gushing, "To have that completely spontaneous hug was something that leaves you with goose bumps." Tim Russert--who, like so many Democratic pols who transition to media megabucks, is committed to proving his bona fides by kowtowing to Republicans at every opportunity--professed, "You can feel...in this town" that Democratic "nerves are frayed." Russert was reacting to a rare display of Democratic spirit during the speech--booing when Bush sought to mislead the country into dismantling the most successful government program ever attempted in America: Social Security. To Russert and much of the permanent Washington establishment, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat--or at least one who's willing to act that way.

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Go read it; it's good stuff.

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