April 03, 2006

A Political Post!

Whew, it's been a while since I've done one of these. I better ease my way in. Through Kos I ended up at Firedoglake, where they're running a weekly series of posts where they expose the insane things that make their way through the right wing blogosphere and even peak into the mainstream media (MSM to those savvy folks out there) from time to time. All this is in reaction to a piss poor interview by Wolf Blitzer accepted Hugh Hewitt's assertion that the lefty blogosphere is a "fever swamp" at face value.

Ultimately, this is what annoys me about the idea that the MSM is "liberal". It's not so much that I think Blitzer and most of his collegues aren't liberal themselves, but they're either so concerned about appearing liberal or are so woefully uneducated and unprepared that they get railroaded when they have a conservative on.

Actually, I have to run right now, but I may return to this later.

1 comment:

Noumena said...

The mainstream media are not liberal. They're also not conservative. This is a point Eric Alterman made years ago, and I think Al Franken of all people expressed similar sentiments (though I'm half asleep right now, so it might more realistically have been Michael Moore): the values expressed in the mainstream media are capitalist values, the values of the transnational business conglomerates that own these outlets. They're pro-business, pro-consumerism, and pro-conformity. 'Sit down, shut up, and buy this so the hot chicks will give you blowjobs' is neither a liberal nor conservative message.

This goes for Fox News as well. They just toss some shills for movement conservatism/the religious right into the mix because it lets them carve out a ratings niche.