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The Myth of the Liberal Media
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If you have had the misfortune to have listened to today’s conservatives, you have no doubt heard the nonstop railing about the villainous liberal mainstream media (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN) whose sole purpose is to squelch conservative thought and brainwash the American populace into supporting immoral, evil, tax-and-spend liberal policies. Just turn on vitriolic radio ranters like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity and you will no doubt hear this exact sentiment echoed- over and over. It provides the aforementioned people (who have little to say) something to talk about. These sentiments have basically become accepted as fact in the political arena. However, using the Bush Presidency as an example, we can see that the idea that the mainstream media is a tool of the Democratic Party and biased towards liberal politics is not true. In addition, we can see that there is a massive Right Wing media that manipulates the supposedly liberal mainstream media.
Think logically, now. The mainstream media is currently owned by massive corporations. Disney owns ABC. Viacom owns CBS. And perhaps most frightening, one of the largest corporations in America, Microsoft, is merged with NBC in the form of a cable channel. Massive corporations are not known for being bastions of liberalism and progressive ideas. They are interested in making money, not imposing politics. When they do work with politics, corporations are unabashedly conservative; Conservatives work harder to make sure these corporations can make more money. The mainstream media is not liberal. There is a liberal media, but it consists of various websites and small-circulation magazines, and is most certainly not the mainstream media.
The press’s goal has changed. Once, the purpose of a free press was to investigate truth and report it. Now, due to coordinated efforts dating back to the 1970s, (mostly Conservative whining that their insane ideas were not given a public forum) balance became the focus of news, rather than actually telling the public if what has been said is true. Rather than reporting what is true and what is false, the media has become lazy and not bothered to determine these things. The mainstream media now simply lets both sides present their view. This is not journalism. This provides conservatives with an unrestricted forum to present their views. So this pretty much demolishes the notion that the mainstream media wants to squelch conservative thought, because every night on the evening news you can hear what conservative politicians have to say, true or not.
Bush also has been particularly adept at manipulating the lazy and profit-oriented media. His administration releases bad news on Friday afternoons, because Saturday paper readership is the lowest. Bush’s press representatives are extremely hostile to supposedly liberal reporters. His administration also used taxpayer money to fund fake news broadcasts that were supportive of his views. They looked like real news reports, but were excessively biased. When they were sent to news stations, amazingly, some ran them on their broadcasts without question! The Administration has also been known to use taxpayer money to bribe conservative pundits and media personalities to espouse the current view of the White House. If this isn’t media manipulation, I don’t know what is. Democrats are too disorganized to pull this stuff off.
Think of what a liberal media can do. In the 70s, the liberal mainstream media brought down a president. Nowadays, the current administration does much worse than Nixon ever did and the corporate-owned media twiddles their thumbs, because they are lazy. That liberal mainstream media is dead. The new media worries about making money and how easy things are to cover. Investigative journalism is completely dead and people don’t care, because they are engrossed in pointless, non-news stories that masquerade as real news- Michael Jackson, The “runaway bride”, Scott Peterson, etc. The accusations of liberal bias consist mostly of out-of-context quotes circulated endlessly among the endless quantity of Right-Wing think tanks. They are completely bogus and the Right Wing knows it, but they continue complaining about the oppressive liberal media because they have a need to be portrayed as a heroic minority, when in fact, they control all three branches of government and are adept at manipulating the force that shifts public opinion- the media. If you want to see real liberal media, go to the school library and read through “The Nation”. Then go and watch the evening news. The difference is quite striking.
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