A post of Josh Marshall’s crystallized an idea in my head today–the media, or large segments thereof, really has gotten pretty conservative. Marshall wrote about Mort Kondrake’s column in Roll Call that included this bit of Bushery:
| President Bush bet his presidency — and America’s world leadership — on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew. |
He assumes that it’s the people’s fault that Bush’s “bet” is going to fail. Incompetence? No, couldn’t be that. But I digress.
There’s a lot of this crap floating around–how about how conservative the dems are and how much that had to do with congressional gains? I suspect I am somewhat late to the party in this realization, but what I want to do here is make the point that the Republicans have been successful in sowing the idea that the media has a liberal bias, and the media themselves bought into this enough to move rightward.
One way to combat this in a grass/netroots way is to challenge this assertion and make the contrary one–the media has become conservative, to the ruin of all. They need to be skeptical, objective, and not allow themselves the sort of spoonfeeding by the administration that is all too common.
It will not be easy or quick to reverse the unfortunate rightward list of the media, but with time, I hope that at the very least our side can generate enough tension to cancel out that of the rightwing crybabies. If we can pull them back to true objectivity, I’d count that as a victory, inasmuch as the facts have a liberal bias.