Our "Liberal Media" Cowering in Fear

Conservative Liars James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart

If we had systematically pointed out that the pre-Murdock Wall St. Journal was a touch on the right, do you think they would have tried to resurrect Joseph Stalin to bring him in as a blogger? No? Then why the fuck do media organizations accused of being liberal need to hire (or validate) not just conservative, but the most discredited, lying, and bigoted conservatives they can possibly find to throw off the dreaded liberal label?

Here are three examples, just from the last year. (I'm therefore excluding, among other incidents, MSNBC hiring Michael Savage and the NYT and Washington Post hiring half the neo-con crazies in the world for their op-ed pages.) In May, CNN hired Erick Erickson. Most of us just chalked that up to CNN being as ridiculously, vapidly, stupid as they usually are. I mean, liberals and anyone paying attention to the media were upset, naturally, but CNN is an easy target, and they were worthy of nothing but scorn long before that.

The Rally Lived Up to Its Promise of False Equivalence

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear happened this weekend. It was surprisingly as apolitical as Stewart and Colbert had promised, and perhaps even anti-political. They never even said to go vote, which, in a non-partisan fashion, would have absolutely been the right message. As exciting as it was, in this regard, the rally may well have done more damage than good.

First, as I pointed out before, the promise of this rally was one of pure false equivalence, basically between Fox News and MSNBC. This is something that gets me consistently lecturing people in real life, something that Jon Stewart knows better than to do, and something he usually doesn't do. Keith Olbermann, in response to the rally, said two things: 1) The message of ratcheting down the tone was not lost on him, and so he is suspending the "Worst Person in the World" segment. (Kudos to him for being responsive - this is a great move.); and more importantly, 2) he called out Jon Stewart on the false equivalence between MSNBC and Fox. This might seem self-serving, but he's absolutely right. In a way, Stewart's lambasting of both sides is, ironically, his own form of fearmongering rhetoric about the health our of discourse. Here's the Olbermann clip. It's well worth watching.

Restoring Sanity to "Both Sides"

By now, most of you will have heard about Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity", which coupled with Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive," will give Glenn Beck's rally the sound mocking it deserves. I just wanted to write a quick note about it right now. A more thorough post on the genesis of this event and what that means generally for media will be coming soon.

Basically, Jon Stewart is great, and I'm a huge fan, but when he announced this rally he did something I believe deeply destructive and have written about before - false equivalences. Glenn Greenwald, however, just wrote the post that I wanted to write, so I'm just going pass it on, quoting him:

I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don't have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it's also fine if, as seems to be the case, he's eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism. But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too -- the proposition that Bush is a "war criminal" -- is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.

A Columnist Fills the Gap Left By the Ombudsman and Media Critic

Thank you to E.J. Dionne (who is neither Andrew Alexander, the Post's ombudsman nor Howard Kurtz, their resident so-called media critic) for writing in the Washington Post what needs to be said over and over again where more eyes can see it.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

"Both Sides" Journalism and the Role of Media's Subservience To Government

I'm a little late on this, but I wanted to mention something about the study that came out of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government a couple weeks ago, regarding newspapers' use of the word torture. Specifically, I want to use it to put in context my assertion that unfortunately, the potentially bad results of government funding of journalism are already here, with none of the benefits.

The study documents a "significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding." Basically, in the last 100 years, the newspapers discussed waterboarding occasionally and unequivocally called it torture, right up until the government began asserting that it was not torture.Glenn Greenwald sums up the implications well:

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

What it also does is make the bogeyman specter of government control irrelevant to the discussion because for better or worse (obviously worse) it's already here.