“The problem with this thesis is that there simply has not been any of this “anti-democratic violence” coming out of any movement conservative circles.”

Uh huh, sure. Try telling that to George Tiller, oops. Or maybe those guards at the DC Holocaust Museum, double oops! Well, maybe you could ask the Secret Service, they’re alive, and they could tell you an interesting story about the 400% rise in death threats since the President stopped being a Republican. Or maybe you could just pay attention to the Bush Administration’s report on growing right-wing extremism, huh? That’s not even to mention the gun-toting, anti-democratic Birthers who recently tried to close down debate at Town halls across the country. Shall I go on?

In short, I call bullshit.

“Those people have problems, and they advocate violent, idiotic foreign policy, but their body count is far lower than that of the American Left just lately, it seems.”

You care to grace that stunningly untrue statement with anything as conventional as a single factual reference? Because if you’re trying to use the Fort Hood Massacre as an example of ‘left wing’ violence, you, my friend, have just put the World’s Biggest Wanker hat firmly on your pointy head, and it fits very snuggly indeed.

The problem with this thesis is that there simply has not been any of this “anti-democratic violence” coming out of any movement conservative circles. Those people have problems, and they advocate violent, idiotic foreign policy, but their body count is far lower than that of the American Left just lately, it seems.

“The point is that, even if the mainstream media is liberal, then blaming it for Republicans’ woes and celebrating its oblivion is problematic.”

Which is fair enough, as far as it goes, except for the “even if the mainstream media is liberal” part, because the US MSM really – isn’t – liberal. Not at all. In fact it’s firmly on the conservative side of any debate, and has been for decades. Whether you put this down to ideological bias, pressure from corporate owners, or just plain laziness, the truth is that the modern MSM operates under the rule that everything is always good news for Republicans, and the facts of any story will be twisted and mis-reported until they fit that frame.

Should you need immediate proof of this claim, just look at the coverage given to the recent elections and what they meant for American politics. The Democrats picked up two seats in the House, without which the Health Care Reform bill would not have passed in its current form. One of them in a region where Democrats haven’t won since the Civil-War, and where Republican voters had a genuine representative of the Stop Health Care Reform At Any Cost wing of the GOP to vote for. They lost two Gubernatorial elections in states that, historically, always vote against the dominant party, and where both of the Democratic candidates were unpopular – long – before Health Care Reform became an issue.

Are the MSM portraying this as a victory for Democrats? Are they making a big deal of the schism in the Republican electorate exposed by the fiasco in NY-23, which pushed lifelong moderate Republicans to vote for a Democrat? Or are they instead pushing the meme that Virginia and New Jersey are troubling defeats for the Democrats, and making a big deal of how this might force ‘moderate’ Democrats to vote against Health Care Reform?

A ‘Liberal Media’ would be doing the former, but that’s not what’s happening, is it?

You refer to Fox News as being ‘outside’ of the MSM, but how can you say that with a straight face when the last few weeks have seen the MSM falling over itself to hug it’s ‘sister network’ to its bosom and present the White House’s simple acknowledgement of Fox’s real-world status as nothing more than the propaganda wing of the GOP as somehow ‘Nixonian’, and proof of censorship? The Washington Village certainly doesn’t see Fox News as outside the mainstream media, quite the opposite.

My point, simple as I can make it, is that you’re trying to gently educate a bunch of people who – know – that Fox News is telling them the unvarnished truth about everything. When they see someone on another channel pushing the same stories, except with “souces claim” instead of “everyone knows” before the Republican talking-point of the day, that’s just proof for them that the MSM is totally Liberal. They haven’t come to this addled state of mind by accident, they’ve been told this over and over and over again for years.

Even simpler, it doesn’t matter how politely you try to lead movement conservatives away from the cliff of electoral failure and anti-democratic violence, Beck, Palin and Limburgh say you’re wrong, and that’s good enough for them.

In many European countries, newspapers and television more or less openly identify as partisan. Here in America, we are still wed to the mid-century ideal of objective journalism, perhaps a worthy ideal but also an unrealistic and unfulfilled one. If the future points towards a return of the late 19th century model of “yellow dog” journalism, then perhaps it isn’t so bad. Certainly, that kind of reporting was blatantly slanted, but at least you had several competing outlets available. Yet the media landscape as it is shaping up in our day seems to be destroying not only objectivity but professionalism itself. Foreign news bureaus are shutting down and being replaced by what exactly?

Using Joe the Plumber is obviously a straw man argument of sorts, but his rise last year was still instructive about the uncertain future of journalism itself. Blogs have obviously fulfilled an important function in “speaking truth to power,” but they are, by their very nature, narrow and tailored to a limited audience. Whatever its faults, 20th century media was directed at a broad audience. What will replace it should be of concern to conservatives, liberals, and moderates alike. If putting forth that concern is simply a devious tactic of “couching” my real agenda, then my apologies for seeming so. The point is that, even if the mainstream media is liberal, then blaming it for Republicans’ woes and celebrating its oblivion is problematic.

Matt Swartz is 100% right in his comment. The Academe is the source of so much of what we must contend with in keeping our freedom. In an age when every American believes that he must be sheep dipped through college to attain a decent living, the people who control what goes into that dip have tremendous power.

Sorry, but can you run that by me again? I’ve read it half a dozen times, the last three while huffing a bag of out-of-date glue in a vain attempt to get into the state of mind you appear to have been inhabiting while writing it, and it – still – doesn’t make any sense.

I could have sworn I was mocking Oskar’s oh-so-delicate attempt to smuggle in the notion, under cover of dollops of ‘Liberal Media’ BS, that maybe, just maybe, conservatives relying solely on ideologically approved sources for their facts and figures might, just might, lead to them making the wrong decisions on important issues, because they – started – with crappy information in the first place.

Not because this isn’t true. It is. It’s true on a scale so vast that would require a set of scales built out of experimental composite fibres in a floating space-station to weight blue whales and the egos of MSM talking-heads in order to give an idea of its colossal truthfulness.

But that wasn’t what I was mocking. The whole’Liberal MSM’ lead in, now – that’s – what I was mocking. The scales you’d need to meaningfully weight the awe-inspiring untruthfulness of – that – particular concept can currently be built only in the imaginations of mathematicians, and even then it’s a theoretical problem most ambitious theorists won’t touch, because in order to build a set of scales that would take the weight, you’d need to create a material so dense it would mess with the cosmic forces behind galactic drift, and they don’t think that’s possible for us to achieve right now.

Or, to boil it down a bit, the fact that Oskar feels that he needs to wrap his unpalatable nugget of truth inside a shell of comforting wingnut mythology in order to even try and reach out to the modern conservative base makes me laugh.

But, y’know, since you think my original post came across as approving, YMMV.

The Christians expect MSM bias, when they say that you can’t judge a Book by how it’s covered.

Keep your friends close. A nice stimulus package will reward them, with enough left over to buy the MSM to deal with your enemies.

I can look at any person, and any editorial or article, and see who is on the right or the left of whom. Except for myself, of course, because I am an independent thinker, and am therefore harder to categorize.

The death of journalism has been greatly exaggerated… regardless of the number of wooden stakes we have used up.

Save us from “open-minded” judges!
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004139.html

Can not the same thing be said about journalists who manage only to thinly veil their bias, in the name of “open mindedness”?

Standing on the shrinking iceberg of leftwing journalism, the only people mourning it’s death are chanting, “Most Americans agree with us!”

Rush, Palin, and Fox will continue to show a “larger than expected” profit.

Tony J approves of Oskar, and says, “American Media lost any pretence of being ‘Liberal’ back in the 1980s”.

Think about it.

Answer: Who are mainstream media?

Truth to tell, the American Media lost any pretence of being ‘Liberal’ back in the 1980s, and are now at a stage where the “No, really, I can spin this monumental fuck-up as actually good for the GOP and bad news for Democrats, just watch me!” conventional wisdom they pump out has driven away the majority of people who – want – actual fact-based news, while acting as a gateway drug for the minority who need to hear how right they are all the time, and so are losing them to Fox News, where the crazy is uncut and has no nasty reality to spoil the taste.

Very sad, but instructive. And they’d still be getting away with it, if it wasn’t for those pesky bloggers and their addiction to things they can prove by the simple expedient of pointing at a headline.

Before we charge him with high-treason, we need to make sure we have given him a fair chance.

The media elite are merely looking for stories, but they can only find the stories that their words can reach, and as such, they’re limited to the center-left portion of our nation’s political spectrum that the academics have carved out.

If you want justification for left-wing contempt for the MSM, here are two giant issues not well reported on television: the health care crisis as actually confronted by ordinary Americans, and how in fact we compare in cost and outcomes to other developed countries – when in fact all you hear from talking heads is “ours is the best health-care system in the world”; and the realities of the Bush administration’s torture regime – now resulting in overseas indictments of CIA agents – which is a historic national embarrassment and hasn’t been covered on television at all.

It is common for conservatives to say the MSM is biased because most reporters vote for Democrats. In fact, of course, one increasingly sees Republicans and even conservatives on television, while the number of bona-fide liberals that appear can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and real leftists are nowhere to be seen; Republicans during both the Bush and Obama administrations are far more numberous as talk show guests than Democrats, with John McCain setting some kind of record for appearances; and Obama is being criticized nightly by liberals like Ed Schultz. What is never acknowledged is that most anchors are multimillionaires, with gold-plated medical insurance besides, whose connection to ordinary Americans is for all practical purposes non-existent; and networks are increasingly owned by multinational corporations – like GE, in NBC’s case – and if you think at senior levels these firms have a liberal agenda there’s a bridge I would like to sell you.

I agree that the media generally can be described as “the handmaiden of the bipartisan ‘Warfare State’.”

But anyone who argues “liberal bias” in the media really needs to address how the MSM treated the Clintons in the 1990s and, especially, Al Gore in the 2000 election. Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler exhaustively demonstrates how unscrupulous, biased and ignorant the MSM behaved toward Gore, ultimately leading to Bush’s election in 2000.