Reply #30: I feel that this has been going on for a very long time

[Time for change]

But it's substantially worse now, because of the media consolidation.

My memory of this starts with the 1972 election, since that is the first one where I was old enough to vote. I felt that the media was very unfair to McGovern. He was labelled as some sort of radical leftist. Why? Because he was for withdrawl from Viet Nam, a woman's right to choose, decriminalization of marijuana, and giving a fiscal break to the poor.

George McGovern was no radical. He was a progressive Democrat very much along the lines of Paul Wellstone. But the media labelled him as a radical, and it stuck. He lost the popular vote to Nixon by about 20%, and he carried only one state -- Massachussetts. I'll bet that there are few Democratic politicians who have forgotten that, and I'll bet that almost all of them keep that lesson at least in the back of their minds when they run a campaign.