It might seem futile to try to select just two quotes from the previous decade and single them out as bookends to illustrate how the political press so often malfunctioned over the last 10 years. But if pressed, I know which duo I'd nominate in hopes of highlighting the absurdity behind the never-ending right-wing claim about supposed "liberal media bias."
Y'know, the same "liberal media" that over the previous decade unleashed its venom on Al Gore, morphed into George Bush's lapdog cheerleaders, and created unfair double standards for covering the new Democratic president, Barack Obama.
The first quote I'd nominate actually comes from very late 1999, but the implication was pure 2000 and the decade that followed. The passage appeared in a Time report about the unfolding Democratic primary battle and came just as the Beltway press was unveiling its unapologetic War on Gore, as The Daily Howler might put it.
The orgy of resentment that erupted toward Gore during the 2000 campaign season was likely unprecedented in American politics, as media elites did very little to hide their disdain for Gore. For years, they mocked him, bad-mouthed him, and made up nasty stories about him. (Hint: Inventing the Internet.) Acting as a conduit for the RNC, the press actively tried to delegitimize the Democratic Party nominee for president. And the chronically caustic and unfair press coverage cost Gore the election in the historically close 2000 campaign.
Which brings me to Quote of the Decade No. 1, courtesy Time's Eric Pooley and his New Hampshire primary dispatch: [emphasis added]:
[T]he 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.
If readers needed confirmation regarding the open contempt for Gore, blogger Mickey Kaus soon traveled to New Hampshire and announced the consensus among journalists: "They hate Gore. They really do think he's a liar. And a phony."
My second Quote of the Decade nominee arrived 110 months later and via NBC's Chuck Todd. It was uncorked inside the new Obama White House press room, on January 23, 2009. The topic on the table was the administration's proposed economic stimulus package and whether the White House, which was hoping for a bipartisan effort on the legislation, would be disappointed if the bill passed with little or no Republican support. And that's when Todd asked Robert Gibbs the following:
Would [the President] veto a bill if it didn't have Republican support?
That's right. Just days into the new presidency, Todd wanted to know if Obama would go ahead and take the unprecedented action of vetoing his own legislation designed to immediately jump-start the faltering economy because not enough members of the opposition party supported the stimulus bill.
If nothing else, Todd's absurd query highlighted the unheard-of double standard the press constructed for the new Democratic president. Namely, when addressing the issue of bipartisanship (i.e. "involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties") the press decided to hold only one of the political parties accountable: the Democrats. Bipartisanship was now something Democrats had to bring to fruition.
My bookend quotes capture how the "liberal" Beltway press corps changed the rules to cover Gore at the beginning of the decade and Obama at the end of it. And how did the same press corps spend the years between Gore and Obama? Lying down for Bush, of course. Having developed rabbit ears for the right-wing taunt of "liberal media bias," reporters, editors, producers, and pundits seemed determined during the Bush years to prove how un-liberal they really were. In the process, the press abandoned its traditional watchdog role and morphed instead into lapdogs.
Read the full Media Matters column here.
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I believe Clinton never thought it would be brought to light, that the "liberal press" would have covered for him as it did for Presidents in the past: FDR had his honey AND was paralyzed from the waist down. Nary a peep. JFK reportedly had a revolving door on his bedroom (metaphori
What changed? The "death" of the liberal press, or more accurately
I'm pretty sure the current atmosphere wasn't what was intended by the "freedom of the press" section of the First Amendment, but until ethics is again a motivator, we'll have to keep exposing the untruths & omissions as best we can.
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the last 25 years. What the article comes up has revelance not just in the UK.
It begins:
Papers went big on foreign news and story counts were high, but celebritie
columnists were a rare commodity
How did readers know what to think in 1984? Once you get over the minuscule, blurred pictures
and the lack of colour, the first thing that strikes you about the newspapers of that year is the
paucity of opinionate
the passionate
ago.
http://www
That article might be one explanatio
And gone is the dependence on the media (when looking at the industry data), a trend
also solving lots of problems.
it should get it's money's worth on the foul
fox has been eating our lunch
the left needs to start playing the game by fox's rules.
http://www
if they are getting rung up for being liberal - fine make it worth the charge.
they can help us organize like Fox did for the teabaggers
What country are they talking about? Can't be the USA, our media is ANYTHING but liberal but there is a lot of bias.
.
Walter Cronkite earned his sobriquet as the "most trusted man in America" in the 1960's, not so much due to his liberal politics as to his trustworth
But the "bie lie" of inherent liberal bias in the media has been repeated so often for the last 40 years, that too many people have swallowed this fallacy hook and sinker, which blinds them to TRUE bias and manipulati
Walter (and the others of his day, to be fair.....) were trusted NOT because they were liberal or conservati
Nowadays we've got the "news" section of Faux News claiming to be speaking only the facts, but injecting right wing politics at every other statement. And MSNBC isn't much better, though at least it doesn't have as many viewers...