Letters To America - The Liberal Media Lie

Today, we're talking about the "liberal media" myth. You know, the one where the media is dominated by liberals who give news stories a liberal slant, the one that's complete bollocks. This whole thing got started because years ago, someone did a study that concluded that the majority of reporters have fairly liberal views on social issues. Well, colour me shocked. Of course, that led to the all-pervasive myth that reporters being liberals are unable to report objectively, they have to slant things their own way. These days, it's got to "self-evident" status. If you dispute the myth, you just get told to go watch TV for a while or just plain insulted. Of course, in amongst this, no-one bothers to consider that the people who actually decide what gets on the air or into print, the editors, are overwhelmingly conservative. No, the myth just gets repeated over and over until the media are so scared of being accused of having a liberal bias that the American media actually has a decidely conservative bias (call me a liar? Then why did twice as many daily papers endorse Bush as Gore?). It's called "convincing the self", if you have the lie drummed into you over and over again, you start to believe it and not only that, you actually start to promulgate it too. Yeah, the mainstream media has such a liberal bias that the story about Bush going AWOL from his unit during Vietnam became a debate on whether the documents were forged or not. Now, I'm not going to get into whether or not Bush went AWOL because to be honest, I don't know but you notice how the attention was shifted from the main issue to a side-issue that actually made no difference anyway? I mean, surely the logical response would have been to provide detailed proof that the allegations were without merit before you attack the documents themselves? Or am I just being dense here? I mean, one could play the "It's obvious they were without merit" card except that firstly, it isn't obvious and secondly, this is the same country that impeached a president over getting a blow job. Yeah, the media was real liberal then. For about a year, all we had was All Monica, All The Time and even after he left office, the right is still demonising the poor guy but that's another topic for another time.

What gets me is that teh people spouting this "liberal media" crap so often are people like Bill O'Lielly (host of The No Truth Zone), Ann "Nutcase" Coulter, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. If the media is so bloody liberal, why are they all over it? Bill O'Lielly tells lies, lies, more lies and then lies about his previous lies and there's barely a sound but half the country is ready to hang, draw and quarter Michael Moore for saying unkind things about the president. Seriously, have the dittoheads taken over? I might not like Moore's films but when did disliking the president become a capital offense? Of course, I know why this is happening, the cult of personality surrounding GW Bush but again, that's a topic for another time...