The "Liberal Media"

(Originally written and posted in May 2002, then modified and augmented starting November 6th 2002.  This blog/link list flows into the old essay.  Last update May 11, 2005)

[Tom Tomorrow's strip on the topic]

March 7, 2004: How to fight the Cheap Labor Conservatives  This great article explains everything you need to know to understand what the not-so-liberal-media is doing to America.  It's especially important to read this if you believe the old line about "big government liberals" and "fiscally responsible conservatives."  

February 11, 2004 You couldn't ask for better proof that the media is far from liberal.  John Kerry was almost as irrelevant as Joe Lieberman, and far more stiff than Gore.  More important--he has a record that shows he's more than a little friendly with corporate special interests, and he shares membership in the mysterious Skull and Bones society with George W. Bush.   Howard Dean, on the other hand, was telling it like it is.  He was questioning the whole corporate controlled campaign industry.  Overnight, Dean becomes a mere joke, and Kerry is sweeping the nation.  As if to pour salt on the wound, CNN publicly confessed that they overplayed the Dean scream, and probably contributed to destroying his campaign.  [May 11, 2005 addendum: Think about Dean's auto de fe, and then consider Bush's ultra elite, party-members-only "townhall forums" come infoganda soirees.  Oddly enough, those who accuse us simultaneously of being fascists and communists fail to notice the irony.  Probably that's what most irritates me at this particular moment.]

October 27th 2003 American Journalism Review--Are the News Media Soft on Bush?  if you have an IQ of three digits or above, eyes and ears, the answer is yes.    Want proof?  How come the majority of the rest of the world thinks that Americans who voted for Bush are either daft or duplicitious.  As the author illustrates, ever since the exaggerated patriotism of 9/11, it has been taboo to give Bush any tough questions. But, with the Iraq fiasco heating up, things may be changing.  If we had to listen to Clinton's kinky sex life, why can't we hear more about the Bush regimes utter and ubiquitous corruption and incompetence?  Because they know that sticky cigars and semen besmirched dresses sell more news.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly on Schwarzenegger: "The Los Angeles Times is out to get him, to destroy him. . . . Most guys have done dopey things with women." Bill O'Reilly on Clinton during impeachment: "The American people have a right to know everything there is to know about President Clinton's behavior."

September 2003--Top Ten Underreported and Censored Stories for 2003

February 2003--The liberal media fires Phil Donahue and replaces him with Michael Savage.

Economist Paul Krugman makes an informal comparison of major newspapers for liberal bias, and determines that the most anti-Bush US newspaper is USA Today. (??!!??)  Further he shows that several typical remarks made by lying windbag harpies like Ann Coulter about the New York Times are blatantly false.

November 6, 2002 article by Jeff Koopersmith on the significance of the Nazification of America and its media

List of Groups Promoting Oppression or Right Wing Agenda--no affiliation or conspiracy among them is implied, but these are the big names in the conservative war on humanity.  Excellent resource.

It ain't necessarily so.  
It ain't necessarily so.
Just 'cuz the media tell you so.
It ain't necessarily so.  (If Gershwin were still alive)

The lie of the liberal media is, not surprisingly, a creation of the media.  A quick glance at the corporate web of multinational ownership reveals that the media is controlled by and quite clearly biased toward a very conservative perspective. Don't believe me?  Let's take a look at the remarks of a conservative commentator.  This entertaining diatribe helps make the facts more concrete.  (The Koopersmith article mentioned above is more recent and disturbing) The Washington Post acknowledges the Right Wing Machine.  The problem is that most of the gibbering idiots that are whining about the liberal media do not pay attention to the media anyway.  Instead, they are glued to AM talk radio, where truth is continually immolated in the name of brainwashing the listeners to accept the idea that the rules of law must be defined by corporations and rich people, and that the less than 1/2% of our budget spent on foreign aid is excessive, but the enormous subsidies that are EVEN NOW going to the defunct Enron are justifiable.  YOU are still paying for Enron's demise, and they (and many others) are still out there taking the resources that the IMF and World Bank are stealing from the Third World in the name of "Free Markets".  

As Mark Crispin Miller has stated, Bush campaigned, "won" and is still supported by voters whose only real defense of Bush's idiocy and illegal activities is "He's not Clinton."  So, let's see how different he is from Clinton.  For the record, I'm not a fan of Clinton.  I consider him to be the nice, intelligent guy the corporate right wing put into office to get George Bush Sr.'s initiatives accomplished.  He's sexy (I hear),  charismatic and witty--just what the right wing needed to distract the liberals while he got through lots of pro-corporate/anti-citizen legislation.  In spite of all the Republican shenanigans during his tenure, I feel that Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had.  He got Bush Sr.'s NAFTA through, and simply by ignoring the terrorist activities of anti-abortion bombers and snipers and anthrax threats (didn't hear about it?  Gee, must be that "liberal media" hiding the truth from you.)  

Take a look at the farm and steel subsidies that Dubyah has ramrodded through.   Then there's all that feverish nation building.  Pure Democratic agenda--but this time with the goal of sparking a trade/tarrif war.  Bush is the neo-Mussolini, sub-intellectual everyman that the same corporate right wing put into office to get done all those nasty violations of the Bill of Rights that Clinton failed to get through.  Patriotism and war were just the thing to get the conservative Republican voters to look the other way while Roy Rogers Bush gallops through with that "Patriot Act".  Maybe his next trick will be to command universal health care, while bombing Iraq...Like that'd happen...If this doesn't drive home the point that it hardly matters which party you vote for, then there's not much hope for you.  That said, let's look in more detail at what the right wing has done.

(list made before the 2002 "election")

1. Spent 70 million tax dollars harassing the Clintons legally on fraudulent and trivial charges.  Nothing substantial was produced except a dreadful porn novel.  We also learned that Clinton would do and lie about the very same things that Henry Hyde and many of his other "prosecutors" did.  Thanks to the "liberal media", most Americans have been programmed to believe that Clinton did something wrong, though no court of law has been able to prove it after one of the largest trials in history.  That alone bespeaks an amazingly conservative power within the media.  In comparison, the current "president" is quite obviously guilty of an Enron style profit scam involving illegal insider trading to the tune of $850,000 stolen from investors.  This story is all over the net and world now, but our "liberal media" is completely suppressing it.  

2. The right wing changed laws that exempted the president from immunity from prosecution during office, thus reducing his power and distracting him with legal issues.  They were directly responsible for the "loss of power" that the office of president underwent.  Now that the extreme right is in office, they are changing the laws back.  Thanks to the "liberal media", scarcely anyone has noticed that they changed the rules twice for partisan reasons.  

3.  The Newt Gingrich right wing in 1995 changed laws that once protected us from greedy, sinister corporations like Enron.  Of course, Clinton helped all of this along, so he isn't innocent.  But, nobody is accusing Clinton of being an accomplice in the crime that has the Bush family fingerprints all over it.  The sticky cigars let them make a stink without casting much muck onto themselves.  Thanks again to the "liberal media."  

4.  The Bush administration, and Cheney in particular, all pupils of Richard Nixon, have stonewalled and obstructed various attempts to get information that might incriminate them.  Naturally, the "liberal media" hasn't pointed out that Clinton was expected to tell us about his blowjobs and sticky cigars, but Cheney doesn't have to tell us about how he let Kenneth Lay design energy policies, or that he was negotiating with the Taliban for a pipeline back in July of 2001.  Am I the only one who finds this amazing?  

5.  April 28, 2002, apparently Mr. Bush asks the president of Brazil "Do you have blacks too?"  Although commentary about it flooded the international media and alternative media internet, not a peep was said on the American media.  If Clinton had made such dimwitted remark, don't you suppose the media would be supporting Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott in an attempt to impeach him over it?   Further, what exactly could he possibly have meant in asking this, a question not unlike "Do you have dandelions in your yard too?"   The trouble is, I just can't imagine an innocent scenario in which one might ask such a question, even assuming the completely plausible proposition that our president is so shockingly ignorant of geography.

6. The current administration, with special emphasis on the "Brains" (Mr. Cheney) is thoroughly entrenched in the energy and weapons industries that make the current events seem like corruption raised to new, inconceivable degrees.  His kneejerk bulldog of a wife is promoting her new book and preaching about patriotism and history as if she represents some sort of authority on the matters of ethics and civics.  Above all, she is attacking teachers and intellectuals who are raising questions about the venal and sinister motives of her husband.  In spite of all this blatant hypocrisy and conflict of interest, the media is sucking it all up and spewing it at us on a daily basis--as if there really were an upstanding, moral and patriotic contingent ruling this country and the liberal college professors are telling lies that are fabricated by Fidel Castro and the usual cast of anti-American suspects evoked by the paranoid.  As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

What explains all this irony?  A liberal media?  Obviously not.  That's a smokescreen they throw up when you bring up information that didn't appear on CNN or Fox News.  Could it be that the media is filling our tiny brains with crap so that we don't pay any attention to what these parasites do?  No, I think all that is too complicated.  The answer is simple.  Most Americans are too busy watching Fear Factor and Friends to have time to pay attention to why Europeans hate Bush so much.  They don't even know that Cheney is breaking laws that Clinton never would have even tried to break.   The truth of the matter is that a right wing contingent has nearly complete control of the media, and these corporate sycophants put vast amounts of energy into decrying every single criticism of their fascist agenda as proof that the media is "too liberal."  In other words, any disagreement of scrutiny of the conservative agenda is sufficient proof that, in spite of their domination of the media, that there is some liberal conspiracy operating in the media.

So, who are the conservative myth makers?  Accuracy In Media (AIM) and the Media Research Center (MRC)--and, the Center for Media & Public Affairs (CMPA)  Take a look at these web sites for yourself and see if you think that they represent objective analyses of the media.

In case you still have doubts in your mind, I ask you who exactly are the proponents of the liberal perspective in the media?  Criticizing the Bush administration does not constitute evidence of liberalism.  There are growing numbers of right wingers who are attacking Bush too.  For example, the Cato Institute, the bulldogs of capitalist libertarian ideology are slamming Bush even more than the Democrats and the real leftists.  If this were a valid criterion for bias, then there is more than ample proof that during the Clinton years the media was completely conservative, given their persistent and wasteful harassment of the Clintons.  I want to see some hard evidence that a liberal (anti-corporate) bias has been prominent in the media, and if there is any such evidence, it must be compared with the volume of critical anti-liberal rhetoric in the media.

The truth is, the only liberal voices in the media are separated from the AM radio band, and hard news programs.  They are relegated to entertainment shows.  Examples of liberal "media" voices include: Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donahue, John Stewart's Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.  An occasional quasi liberal pundit appears on news shows: Paul Begala, George Stephanapolous. There are partisan goons like the annoying Al Franken and James Carville. The real liberal voices like Noam Chomsky are barred from any participation in the media.  To what extent do these people actually get heard by Republicans and average Americans?  Instead, they listen to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who tell them that the media are all biased against them.  

"We can support the troops without supporting the President."  said Republican and corporate sycophant Trent Lott, attacking Clinton during our war in Kosovo.  Clearly, he set the standard by which the media (and we) ought to be behaving now in response to what is far more blatant and heinous crime than anything the Clintons might have dreamed up.  Why does this not happen?  Why does the corporate media hesitate to pull the veil away from the Bush family?  What on Earth can possibly explain the fact that Clinton was tormented mercilessly at our expense, while one of the most incompetent CEOs and one of the most corrupt CEOs scramble to hide their guilt with scarcely a peep from the media (Philip Anschutz of Qwest)?  A liberal media??   How would it have sounded if Clinton had tried to pull the Patriot Act routine on America? (I believe that he would have if he could.)  Would Trent Lott have bowed to his will and sacrificed so much personal freedom?  What would happen if a truly liberal contingent headed by Noam Chomsky were allowed to respond to and point out all the conservative bias in the media in equal proportion to the screaming of the media conservatives against liberal bias?  Do you ever hear about conservative bias in the media?  Does the media in fact represent the will of corporate power?  Which politicians most clearly represent the merging of government and corporate power?  What happens to politicians who attempt to stand up to corporate power?  I'm not talking about feigned shows like Al Gore's, but rather defiant democratic revolution on behalf of the people.  What happens to the third party politicians?  Feb. 11 2004: What happened to Howard Dean?

Conservative comedy appears to be restricted to AM talk radio and the Bush White House.  That's probably because the conservatives just aren't funny, at least not in the ways they might want to be funny.  Look at the Lewinski scandal.  Look at that slapstick buffoon of a proxy patsy they put in the White House.   This is the sort of comedy we get from the conservatives.  I find it interesting that the news sources are clogged with conservative propaganda, and the comedy sources are overflowing with liberal propaganda.  Paul Begala is one of the few bright and pleasant, though too caught up in the Democratic politics to be objective.  But, who pays attention to these guys?  Who?  Most Americans dislike Carville, and few have ever heard Begala.  Franken doesn't attract much attention these days with his banal ad hominems.   The word "liberal" has been turned into an insult, thanks to constant media brainwashing and the unpleasant antics of the few Democratic partisan voices who do get on the media.  Mind you, being endorsed by the Democratic party does not mean you are liberal.  The Democratic Leadership Council is the ivory tower of Republicanized Democrats like Gephardt, Clinton, Lieberman and possibly Kerry.  

Sure, the media covers quite a few problems in the Bush administration's plans, but that's their job.  They should do that, even if Bush thinks he can threaten them for it.  These gangsters have the media either bought out or frightened.  None of them has the nerve to stand up and say "This all looks suspicious enough that Bush and his CEO buddies should all be put on trial--It'll sell bigger than the Clinton scandal."  (and it would, if they only would take the ball and run with it.) Liberal media????  Yeah, right.  Liberal media is a fiction promoted by the conservative media to defend themselves from every single little criticism...  Enough is enough.  This is one patriotic American citizen who will not stand silent during the corporate buyout of America.  Seek out information from sources outside of the conservative corporate media.  Stop watching CNN, MSNBC and FOX news.  Avoid CBS, NBC and ABC.  Read news from other countries.  Listen to Limbaugh to keep up with the shenanigans of the corporate right wing and listen to the opinions of those who savagely attack liberalism and socialism.  Find out what the left really thinks.  Don't pay too much attention to Democrats--they're more worried about winning elections than fixing the country.  Be critical, and think about who might be distorting the news you are hearing.  I am confident that if you look at the facts in this matter, you will at least agree that the media is not liberal, and that the perspective that it does have is not in the best interest of most of us Americans--unless you relish the idea of becoming an illegal immigrant in New Delhi scrambling for cube farm jobs.