As Jim Treacher likes to say, “If there’s anyone angrier than a liberal who just lost, it’s a liberal who just won.”
Behold: Al Gore in late 2002, after the left lost the midterms in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The reason? Right-wing media bias!
In an interview with the New York Observer, the man who would be leader of the free world declared the political press includes “major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party.” He cited Fox News, The Washington Times, and Rush Limbaugh, sneering that some of these are “financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.”
So far, Gore sounds like a 1998-vintage Clinton White House argument, Xeroxed from a Sidney Blumenthal memo. But he got nastier. “Most of the media [have] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks – that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole.”
Imagine what would have been the media’s reaction were Richard Nixon to talk about the conspiracy of media forces slanted against him? At the very least, it would have been seen as bad manners (the rantings of a sore loser who never accepts blame for his own flaws) and bad politics (antagonizing major media outlets is never seen as smart, and is often portrayed in menacing undertones as thinly disguised hatred of a free press). More likely, the press would declare him a paranoid nutcase.
But days after Gore’s artless (and mindless) rant, in the very demonized studios of Fox News, there were Mara Liasson and Juan Williams attempting to explain how there’s “some truth” in the future candidate’s talking points.
Chris Matthews last night, after the left won the presidential election and held the Senate, as quoted by Newsbusters:
Chris Matthews has found the problem with how the media covered the 2012 election: Unbiased journalists were simply too focused on being “even-handed” and treating Republicans fairly. Yes, really. The Hardball anchor on Wednesday began his program by declaring, “Did you get the impression during the presidential campaign that the press was trying too hard to be even-handed?” [See video at Newsbusters.]
Matthews continued, “Did you think the people delivering the news were pushing what we call balance at the expense of the obvious facts, that the day-to-day stories never got across the obvious big fact, that the Democrats in this election were like Democrats going back to Jack Kennedy?” Matthews, who previously compared the GOP to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, declared himself the arbiter of media fairness: “So tonight we’re going to nail it. We go to the truth, and why was the truth that dared not be reported in the mainstream media?”
By the way, Chris Matthews works for a network that recently met at the White House to coordinate talking points with Barack Obama, whose CEO is so conservative, so obsessed with getting the GOP’s talking points out, he’s on Obama’s jobs council and believes, as does that fellow rightwing neocon deathbeast Thomas Friedman, that China’s “state-run communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.”
That crazy small-government teabagging corporate media. Fight the power, Chris!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member