The imminent demise of Air America means the liberals will be without a media outlet. This could be disasterous for Dummocrats, left without a consistent channel to the American people with a crucial Presidential election just months away.
Air America, was, of course, formed in a valiant effort to combat the influence of conservative news outlets such as Fox News and, uh....
The imminent demise of Air America means the liberals will be without a media outlet. This could be disasterous for Dummocrats, left without a consistent channel to the American people with a crucial Presidential election just months away.
Air America, was, of course, formed in a valiant effort to combat the influence of conservative news outlets such as Fox News and, uh....
Excuse me, I just fell out of my chair laughing. The most ludicrous thing about Air America wasn't thinking that, given a choice, listeners would actually flock to Al Franken. It was that liberals needed a dedicated outlet to air their views. As if CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and NPR weren't enough.
Conservatives can point to reams of evidence to support a claim of a liberal media bias. A good starting point on the argument is in Bernard Goldberg's book Bias. An even better follow-up is to simply watch, read and listen to the news over the course of a week. It's difficult not to notice the subtle and not so subtle digs at conservative positions. President Bush's press conference was a textbook case. The questions were all framed in ways to embarrass the President, not to inform the American public. "What's your biggest mistake?", "Would you like to apologize for 9/11", "Are you afraid you won't win the election because you're such a poor communicator?"
Liberals, on the contrary, don't point to reams of evidence of a media bias towards conservative positions. They can't. Instead they point to an alleged structural bias because the elite media is owned by large multinational corporations. A former journalism professor of mine, Robert McChesney, has written numerous books on the subject. I didn't buy his line in the bowels of Vilas Hall (even when I was, um, inhaling), and I don't buy it now.
The liberal argument goes like this: the media can't be biased toward liberals because it is owned by big, bad corporations and everyone knows that corporate America is evil and is propped up by its cohort in crime, conservatives.
The flaws in this argument are obvious and fatal. One, because big, bad corporations are so very big, the subtle language choices of any individual reporter are not analyzed and/or controlled by the CEO. Remember the ill-fated the Reagans miniseries? Big, bad Viacom never saw it, had no part in its making and would have willingly let it air on CBS but for the fact that the non-elite media led a popular outcry against it. In fact, retribution against outspoken celebrities doesn't come from their big corporate-owned production companies, it comes from the average American deciding they're not going to buy their album or go to their movie or refrain from booing their fat asses off the stage (Michael Moore, I'm talking to you).
The second flaw is the assumption that any rich person or large corporate entity is necessarily conservative above all other values. Obviously, Rupert Murdoch is, but George Soros has billions and has vowed to do whatever he can to take down Bush. With 10-20 a movie, many a Hollywood liberal has the dollars to make their voice heard (witness Sean Penn's full page newspaper ads defending his actions in Iraq). Large, successful corporations become do not become large, successful corporations by abandoning all business sense to further some secretive conservative agenda. Let's assume for a moment that the board of directors at Disney is populated by right wing conservatives. These right wing conservatives hate that snooty, liberal, Canadian Peter Jennings. But, he's a fixture on the television. He's one of the few stars of ABC News. Without him, ABC's ratings will probably drop and ABC (and Disney) will lose money. Even if this rabid right wing board exists, it won't do anything about him because, let's face it, love of the almighty dollars certainly trumps hatred of liberals.
The final flaw is that individuals in the news media are ever even evaluated by their big bad corporate masters. Does the CEO or President of your company know who you are or anything about how you perform your job? Probably not. In the same way, the head of Viacom doesn't know anything about some junior CBS reporter. That reporter answers to someone at CBS who probably went to the same East Coast/West Coast/Left Coast liberal schools and runs in the same liberal circles and thus the liberal media perpetuates itself through generations of editors and reporters.