The Times Change, But The Whine Continues

In what seems to be an emerging theme, I want to point out that I am growing increasingly frustrated not with the Tea Bag Crowd, or the Birthers, or Sarah Palin, or Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck, or Newt Gingrich. These folks all have their varying roles and, to be honest, they all differ in a variety of ways. The first among them, for all they yell a lot, have attracted the attention of the conservative media, and occasionally are confused about their actual message, are still nothing more or less than citizens going about the business of being active participants in our public life. Are they confused about what it is they want? A great deal less so, I think, than liberals, but this is usually the case with the party out of power. Palin and Gingrich are irrelevant; they are celebrities, not serious public figures, famous for having once been in the spotlight but neither will hold an office of public trust again, and neither is held in high public esteem, outside a small coterie of people who find the things they say agreeable (which is hardly surprising). Limbaugh and Beck are entertainers, pure and simple. They have one job - to attract an audience and keep themselves working, and they know how to do that well. I neither know nor care whether they believe the things they say, nor am I concerned about the effects their views have on public discourse; there have been and always will be demagogues on all sorts of political views. Like Palin and Gingrich, they are irrelevant, the political equivalent of a sideshow freak tent that attracts two kinds of people - the voyeurs who come to gawk, and those who think it is high-minded to come and debunk the whole thing. The first are to be pitied as individuals; the second tend to be busybodies who think it is their business to show the world how clever they are.

No, my real concern is not with these elements. Rather, it is the on-going liberal and leftist whine about the "the corporate media". What specifically attracted my attention this early Easter morning before the sunrise was this.

[T]he Republicans and their allies in the press should be disqualified from this process for propagandizing the public and for allowing the violent rhetoric coming out of these Tea partiers, Fox News and Republican members of Congress to continue. Until some more of your cohorts in the media are willing to do the same thing you did here, that's not going to happen. This dangerous nonsense only going to get worse until we get these media monopolies broken up.

We should have hundreds of those like Rachel Maddow, Amy Goodman, Thom Hartmann, Bill Moyers and others out there that everyone that visits this site is well aware of, giving equal weight to liberal voices that there is a market for, but has been suppressed by our corporate media that wants to pretend to play fair while marginalizing those that care more about facts over hype.

First of all, "the Republicans and their allies in the press"? While there is pretty clear evidence from a whole history of columns and books that some writers - I am thinking of David Broder, Bob Woodward, George Will, Bill Safire - do have some kind of bias in favor of Republican politicians. In more recent times, journalists such as Judith Miller and Chris Cilliza have been pretty consistent in favoring sources with ties to the Republican Party, sometimes to the detriment of our nation (Miller, in particular, ran a series of columns pimping an Iraqi dissident in the run-up to the war in the winter of 2002-2003 despite serious misgivings among intelligence and other officials that the information this dissident was providing was mostly BS). For the most part, however, the press's failings are due less to questions of ideological or party bias and more to institutional sclerosis.

More to the main point of this particular post, my own frustration with the highlighted section revolves around two things. First, as detailed by Bob Somerby, for all she is intelligent and effective, Rachel Maddow is just as apt to fill her show with fluff and nonsense as Glenn Beck; far worse, calling out Republicans for being short on facts is a bit of the old pot-and-kettle show because Maddow is guilty of the same crimes against facts in service of ideology.

Second, and a far larger point, I find it interesting that an internet website would wax eloquent concerning the desire for more liberal voices on television news programs even as these programs - like newspaper opinion journalism - are waning in influence. The record not only of honesty and integrity, but also accountability on these programs is staggeringly low. Recent decades have seen the rise of media stars - I for one no longer consider them serious political commentators - the likes of Bill Kristol, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly who are full of sound and fury, yet are about equally guilty of both erroneous reporting and horribly bad prophetic ability. Their insistence that they have the ears of the powerful and simultaneously give voice to the voiceless are usually only half right. They may be listened to by those in power; those who follow their advice, however, usually end up on the losing end of political struggles, especially over the past four years.

The simple reality is the entire landscape of public discourse is altered. While it may be that these media stars and others one could name draw large salaries, appear all over print and television, and pride themselves on being players in the fascinating, intoxicating game of politics. For the most part, though, they are remnants of an age that is passing. While the shake-up and breakdown is still-ongoing, I continue to insist that the internet - both left and right - is of far more importance than either print or television journalism and commentary.

I really do not care whether there are more "liberal" voices out there, and I do not believe, really, that the issue is some kind of corporate conspiracy against liberal or left-wing voices. Oh, I am quite sure that no self-respecting senior manager at GE, or Disney, or News Corp. would hire a serious liberal (the except, I think, is ABC's hiring of Paul Krugman as a commentator on their Sunday news chat show; he has the advantage of a Nobel Prize that a lot of other liberals don't share). This can be chalked up, easily enough, to the commonsensical notion that no corporation is going to hire someone whose views would be antithetical to their interests. This is neither evil nor illegal. It is just good, solid, corporate self-interest at work.

This is why the internet serves the valuable function of providing a voice to those who are left out of the conversation. Whether one is liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, Socialist or Libertarian, it is easy enough to gain entry to the larger world of our on-going talk and argument.

Sitting around and whining about the lack of liberal voices on television, and using one as factually compromised as Rachel Maddow as a prime example, does no one a service. Just as at one time it was fine that the right owned AM talk radio, it is fine that more conservative voices seem to have the corner on television news programs. For years now, the dominant voices on the liberal/left spectrum have been right here, on the internet, and I see no reason why, for the foreseeable future, this will not continue.

To quote some guy who made a name for himself in politics recently, We are the ones we've been waiting for.