Last week, the Bobster's team decided that it was time for an all-out blitz. So every morning they released another salvo of ethical complaints about Billy Boy, his party and the occasional movie star (just for good measure).
Unfortunately, the big puppy, AKA "that whole Indonesian thing", is undercut slightly by the fact that the Bobster personally accepted money from the same folks during his run for the GOP nomination in 1988. When that tactic didn't work, his campaign responded with that tired old "the liberal media is out to get us" saw.
Liberal media, eh? Let's examine the facts.
Before Spiro Agnew invented that silly term, no one was dumb enough to think that way. Well, thinking doesn't have anything to do with it, but people persist in screaming "liberal" at the media, by which the folks mostly mean newspapers. And by and large, the newspaper is the most liberal mainstream media bastion in any given city. And since in all but the largest cities there is but one newspaper, the conservative goons holler "liberal" monopoly all the time.
But it's just not true.
First, some history. Back when ol' Spiro started venting his ire, most cities of 100,000 or more had at least two newspapers. Whether they were owned by one company or competed more freely, no two papers in one city spoke with the same voice. In places like St. Louis, liberal types tended to agree with the Post-Dispatch, while the conservative side bonded with the Globe. Unfortunately, the fat cats didn't support the Globe and it died. A tabloid successor, the Sun, lasted less than a year. And so St. Louis lies under the iron fist of the liberal Post-Dispatch. Run by the Pulitzer family. And we all know what those people think.
Yeah, right. The Post is one of the more liberal papers in the country, but it has been known to endorse Republicans, and even dittoheads have to admit that the news coverage is hardly biased at all. Scandal is scandal in any season.
And in the cities where two or more papers thrive (New York, L.A., Chicago, Denver, Seattle, DC and a few others), or areas with two large cities in one market (Minneapolis/St.Paul, Tampa/St. Petersburg among them), it's hard to find domination by the liberal forces. In New York, for instance, only the Post can be really considered left of center. Certainly the Times, the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal are all solidly conservative, with Long Island Newsday straddling the middle fairly well. And this is in one of the most liberal cities in the world, a place where in 1994 the Republican mayor felt he had to endorse the (losing) Democratic governor just to keep his own office.
Los Angeles? The L.A. Times is marginally liberal, but that's easily offset by the Orange County Register, the flagship paper of the Freedom chain, whose papers even militia members think might be just a bit too far right for them.
The beat goes on. Locally, folks in both the Republican and Democratic parties whine that the St. Pete Times is biased in the other direction. For a city with a rapidly dropping median age and corresponding rapidly dropping per capita income, I'd say the Times is just a bit too stodgy. But not bad.
I think we can agree that the majority of newspapers in the country stick as closely to the middle as possible, trying not to offend advertisers or subscribers too much. And when we start looking at TV and radio, well, it's obvious that these mediums trend even further to the right than newspapers.
Because while Rush probably wouldn't have played well in a newspaper column, he was a natural at talk radio. And I can't think of even one national talk show host who's pleased to call him or herself liberal. As for television, the stuff is so bland (and that includes 60 Minutes and all those news magazines) that it's pretty hard to find an ideology anywhere. Sure, you can complain about Ellen's "Is she or isn't she?" marketing moves or any characted played by Sandra Bernhard, but come on. The last exciting thing I saw on TV involved beefy guys named LaChappelle and Bono, and by then the score was absurd, anyway.
So if the silly folks would stop whining about the "liberal media", then I promise to quit calling them ignorant fools.
Deal?
Jon Worley edits the subversive e-zine Aiding & Abetting.