Another problem is simply human nature. "Crazy" will always have far more entertainment value than "sane." Freddie Kreuger has grossed billions. Beatrix Potter -- not so much.

oh, jeez, this republican hack is so right, so true, so spot on -- the scales have fallen from my eyes...

it doesn't have anything to do with corporate interests (profits and power)... it's all this surface froth of speediness and technology, and some kind of shit inside editors' and reporters' brains -- neural pathways, no doubt!

yeah, that's the ticket...
oh oh oh, i've been so wrong.

shuddah listened to a good ol republican!!!

all this is probably true, but it ignores the corporate consolidation of media since the demise of anti-trust enforcement which has enabled the propagation of the pro-corporate line throughout the media. where are the fearless investigative reporters of yore? there is also a deliberate replacement of "hard" news with "soft"-anyone think that michael jackson stories are worthy of round the clock coverage??? and the reporting of world news is even worse-it only touches on the supposed effects on the us, is given little time and less analysis.

Another problem is simply human nature. "Crazy" will always have far more entertainment potential than "sane." Freddie Kruger has grossed billions. Beatrix Potter -- not so much.

you know, whenever anybody wants to bring up "human nature" i'm ready for a nice nap...

Add: extremist legislative "leadership" which is more than willing to echo the craziness in D.C. and all the state capitals.

Also add: the power of money in "centering" to the right in both the media and in the technocratic halls of congress. Power to maintaining the machine and the energy that turns it's cranks.

Deciding that the news divisions of networks had to make a profit can hardly be overestimated as a factor.

liberals have lost their primary sources of news and commentary and have not replaced them with those that are explicitly liberal in the same way that the right has created a fully-formed alternative media.

But --if we do that where's the objectivity, how can we know we aren't just as deranged?

I disagree with the notion that there was a de facto liberal bias among major mainstream news outlets from the 1950s through the 1990s. The media's often ridiculous savaging of the Clinton presidency, I believe, proves otherwise.

Not to mention the decades-long fawning over Ronald Reagan, and, before that, the fatuous snickering over almost anything Jimmy Carter said.

I think Bartlett's claim there was a liberal media bias in the 50s-60s is utter, complete crap, especially if he's using the notion to justify or excuse the rise of crackpot right-wingers and their inclusion into civilized discourse. He seems to have forgotten that a 90% marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was a moderate (at the time) Republican creation, not some lunatic lefty pipedream.

What there was, was an establishmentarian bias. Views on the margins of the left AND right were painted "fringe" by media gatekeepers, and seldom got a hearing. It made for boring TV, but today's bobblehead adrenalin-raising "entertainment" comes at an awfully high price, in civility, rationality, and ability to conceptualize & solve problems. I think, contra Bartlett, that the media bias toward frothing right-wingers will always benefit conservatives, steeped as they seem to be in a culture of "the end justifies any rhetorical means whatsoever."

Case in point, just watched Rachel on MTP, and I am astonished anew at the level of utter mendacity, dishonesty, and cynicism of Republican spokesmen (in this case, Armey and Coburn). Armey in particular is a bloated, virtuosically dishonest gasbag whose goal is not discussion or even conversation, simply pounding home a message. He simply does not deserve the airtime he gets, and Gregory should be ashamed down to his shoes for giving that sort of craziness a forum. Rachel did her best to call Coburn and Armey on their lies, since Gregory wasn't interested (or capable), but it was sick-making to watch.

Oh, and the left-right debate on This Week was divided between Arlen Specter (right-wing) and Orrin Hatch (FAR right-wing). Didn't these guys LOSE the last election??

Penance? Why should the Republicans need to do penance when they were really successful....for rich Republicans?
The gap between the wealthy (mostly Republicans) and the poor is now as wide or wider than it has ever been in modern times. The tax burden is less for investment income than for work-derived income. Yet when the word taxes comes up in the Corporate Media it only refers to the Income Tax, the only progressive tax method the U.S. uses.
Mission Accomplished, America!!
Worker rights? Tell it to the Chinese factory owners. Unions? Tell me another joke. Ordinary people in the U.S. have only one tool at their disposal, their right to vote. But the effective propaganda issued 24/7 on just about all Corporate-owned Media dilutes that power. The Clinton presidency should be held up as the prime example of this situation.
Thank the stars for the internet.

Aside from Steve calling out Bartlett on that nonsense about teh liberal bias in the media from the 50s to the 90s, there is another problem with his oh so reasonable email: "... scholars will tend to agree with each other too often to make good television."

Cause, you know, listening to people who actually know what they are talking about, who have studied the issues and have come to a consensus about the correct course makes no sense - after all, we cannot have any fighting in the war room.

Certain Republican talking points (lower taxes on the rich to create jobs; it's better to go to war than be perceived as 'weak' by somebody) are aligned with the interests of the mega-corporations (and their major stockholders) who own the media (and/or the oil rigs) and the interests of the mostly white wealthy people who portray newsmen and newswomen on TV and on the radio.

The failure to acknowledge these facts is a bit too much of an oversight.

The other factor relating to this non-repentance issue that, bizarrely, was not raised in the email is the Republican's strange alliance with Christian fundamentalists. Insofar as the Bush Admin and its major policies were understood as the embodiment of God's vision for the world (America as *the* force for destroying evil and spreading "free market" Christianity), then you can see how difficult it is for Republicans to admit that "God", apparently, was wrong. Bigtime.

Chapter CCCXLVII on how the media landscape keeps Democrats down. Yawn. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with our complete incapacity to frame a message or, you know, actually fight for our principles. You never get tired of this shit, do you?

The problem with activism in this is that confronting the mobs at townhall meetings would be an outright riot and inevitably the progressives will be blamed for it, for just daring to show up.

Everyone knows this, but we haven't mentioned it.

So what do we do?

Fight and be damned, or find a better way?

What is the better way?

Liberals HAVE created their own alternative media.

It's called, "the blogosphere." Liberals own it re: effectiveness, presence, leveraging its tools. Hello, people?

Bruce Bartlett: The Fox News channel is a pure conservative/Republican network that does not pretend to be anything else. Personally, I have no problem with that.

Perhaps I simply can't remember a time when "conservative" talking points weren't simply manure (was there ever such a time?), but not having a problem with outright lies makes me have a hard time accepting his other points which I would otherwise find compelling and quite agreeable.

It reminds me of when I realized the modus operandi of many conservative talking heads (Gingrich, Buchanan, Limbaugh, et al): say something reasonable, follow it up with something a little crazy, then move the discussion to total unreality. I now know that I will be lied to, and if the speaker says something that does apply to reality it is probably not part of their agenda.

I also don't think the media was liberal, but I do think it did more to keep to reality. Today listening to and reading news the "conservative" line seems to be parroted and accepted as true by the media while information from non-conservatives is treated skeptically. It sometimes feels like having gone to the other side of the looking glass.

Barlett's thesis doesn't really make sense. I agree that Fox News is definitely a joker in the pack, but there's no reason it has to be played. I think Fox News should be marginalized as the propaganda machine it is -- no Dem should go near it, and any sponsor who gives them money should be hounded about doing something to egregiously un-American as to sponsor propaganda.

The Fourth Estate serves a valuable function in a Democracy. I'm not sure a Democracy can exist without it, actually. But regardless, in other countries where there is freedom of press (say the UK for example), the leaders are held accountable by the press. I know the UK press is far from perfect but elected officials know that if they stray too far, they'll be called on it. In the US, otoh, we have the press bowing & scraping & lying so that they will have "access."

Bowing & scraping & lying is not the job of the press.

Add: the receptivity of the American people to views that reinforce their belief that the American way of life is not negotiable (read Andrew Bacevich). This was just bound to bring us all kinds of craziness. Reagan put the belief into high gear. We are getting the media and the government that sustains this deadly delusion by combatting alternative visions for a viable and sustainable future. Our system is a vision killer.

There are two different issues here, one involving the media and the other involving the Republican Party.

I mostly agree with Bartlett on the first, and don't have a lot to add to his commentary. He missed something important with respect to the Republicans, though, which has to do with the way Barack Obama and the Democrats dealt with George Bush and his administration in the last campaign.

The things unsettling Americans today, from the economy to violent political turmoil overseas, are too complex to have been produced by any one man or even by any one man's administration. Obama had an opportunity last year, though, to hang them all on Bush and be believed by an American public that had pretty much made up his mind that Bush was out of touch, his administration a failure. Obama missed his chance, running a reactive campaign that focused mostly on timely responses to his Republican opponent, John McCain.

Obama clearly did this because he thought that he would beat McCain easily unless he made some egregious blunder, a correct calculation. The flaw in his reasoning was that Bush, not McCain -- and certainly not any other Republican -- was the face of his party. The whole reason Americans had any interest in the "change" Obama promised was because the country's fortunes had plummeted while Bush was President and Bush's people ran the government.

The end result is what we see now: Republicans are thought of more poorly by most Americans than are Democrats, but not decisively so. Republican opinion, even when it is essentially reiteration of Bush admininstration policy, is still treated respectfully by the media. Democrats see this and blame the media for not calling out the Republicans as insane, right-wing and all the rest of it -- but the American public didn't sour on Bush and the GOP because of any of that, but rather because they had power for a long time and let the country down. It was Obama and the Democrats' job to nail that argument last fall. They didn't do it.

Obama must continue to press for the public option, but he can't do it along. The MSM media must be held to account for their miserable coverage of the last 2 weeks. The raucous comments of a well-organized, but ignorant few have been allowed to dominate, despite the fact that the majority of Americans want a health-care system that includes the public option. Both Obama's people and those parts of the media that care about the truth need to make this known.

dianaw

I found this article Why American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, part 1 interesting.

The basic thesis is that as news coverage expanded from an hour's worth on 3 networks to 24 hour cable news and the internet there really wasn't enough product to be presented in a straight forward fashion as in the Cronkite days, so the product was changed to focus mainly on opinions than facts.

This is similar to what happened in the academic field of literary criticism where there were more critics than texts to criticize. The structuralist/post-modern movement solved this (at least in terms of providing jobs for critics) by moving the subject of criticism from the texts to the readers and critics themselves. This required adding a lot of noise

Barthes, on the other hand, argued that "literatures are in fact arts of 'noise'," and that this equivocation is what readers "consume."

The notion of the "liberal media bias" is one of those paranoid - but effective - arguments of the rightist fringe to move the entire discussion hard right. "If you don't cater to me in every way - including treating outright, provable lies as valid opinion - then you demonstrate bias. If you present any progressive POV - even if demonstrably true - you demonstrate bias."

The exclusion of the progressive viewpoint from TV even extended into entertainment. Wildly popular programs like TW3 (That Was the Week that Was) and the #1 ranked "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" were abruptly canceled.

Programs about "that ol debble, rock-n-roll" like "Shindig" and "Hullabaloo!" were also canceled for the inexplicable crime of being too popular, while programs promoting "law and order" didn't have to be particularly popular to stay on the air indefinitely.

The few examples I named, of course, were only the tiny tip of a huge iceberg, but by moaning about the nonexistent liberal bias, the fascists took any discussion of the actual conservative media bias entirely off the table. When one mildly progressive news anchor (Cronkite, bless him) went off the reservation and reported on the actual Vietnam war instead of the approved Pentagon fantasy, that "proved" the liberal bias. Cronkite was just too big to fire.

Hell, it was well into the 80s before the "liberal media" even allowed anyone to express the "controversial viewpoint" that we had - duh - lost the goddamned Vietnam war. And we wonder why the masses are so damned ignorant. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.

I remember Walter Cronkite delivering a beautiful editorial in 1968 called "The new Prohibition" calling for the legalization of marijuana. Hugh Downs (also a big name in broadcast news for decades) did the same sometime after that. Those were (thanks to the fairness doctrine) delivered on radio, however. No way they - big as they both were - would have been allowed to do that on TV.

A prominent right-wing radio host insisted that JFK was building a political prison in Alaska to detain critics of the administration.

anyone know who it was?

How about democrats going out to the media and tell the stories of Americans like me who have health insurance and are still burried under a mountain of medical bills? Do you think if the President, democratic senators and congress people went on all the cable outlets (including Fox) and just told our stories, they couldn't win on this one essential issue? Media conglomorates be damned! If the democrats really give a shit about helping people like me (who helped get them elected) than go out and fight for what we need.

You people are really smoking crack if you think the Right/GOP are ever going to apologize for anything.

Talk about people living in an alternate reality! Our political system is a 3-ring circus staged in a mental asylum, and YOU folks keep TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OUT OF IT!!

Bartett is perfectly content that conservatives can now tune into their own alternate reality. But reality is not another consumer choice.

So much for human history progressing from ignorance and superstition into science and reason. Surely there is some level of understanding or agreement necessary for a society to survive, let alone prosper.

Just what sort of conservative is Bartlett, anyway?

demoraptor: I'm pretty sure he's referring to Dan Smoot and his radio show The Dan Smoot Report.

In the end, the downfall of liberalism in America will be due mostly to the stupidity of the left wing. I used to think that it'd be due to the ignorance of the rightwing, but no longer.

The entire health care reform debate is a microcosm for what is wrong with the left. Apparently, any legislation MUST HAVE A PUBLIC OPTION or else it will be declared a complete, total, utter failure and Obama will have demonstrated that he is nothing more than a corporate shill.

As apparently I am as well. Despite being pro-environment, pro-choice, anti-Iraq war, pro-gay rights, etc. right on down the line, because I think that decent health care reform that doesn't include a public option would be a huge step in the right direction, I too, am a tool of corporate interests and big pharma.

The one thing I admire about the rightwing is that conservatives are politically savvy enough to present a unified front when they need to. The left cannot, and so instead of suppporting any feasible health care reform because it represents a step in the right direction, some leftists will continue their purity tests and reject everything that doesn't conform to what they, in their apparent infinite wisdom, think health care reform should be.

So the chances are good that we'll get no health care reform at all, or if we do, after crippling the administration by continued attacks if health care passes without the public option, these leftists will continue to cripple Obama because he isn't pursuing the exact sort of climate-change legisliation that they want, etc., all the while blaming the horrible influence of corporations.

The left needs to stop trying to make Barack Obama into the next Jimmy Carter.

I'm sick of the whining by "news" providers are always whining that the reason they "can't" provide in-depth discussion of issues is because they have to fill 24 hours, seven days a week.

Wouldn't regularly scheduled in-depth discussions help them fill the time they are apparently panicked about filling?

There's nothing that prevents them from cutting away for the latest police chase or celebrity death, and I bet they'd be surprised by how many people would in fact tune in.

As someone who's old enough to have lived through much of what Perlstein and Bartlett are talking about, let me say I believe there was, if not a bias, an orientation toward a liberal consensus during the 50s/60s, and much of the 70s. It was a natural thing, as the Roosevelt/Truman years hads been so Dem-dominated that even the Eisenhower years were widely seen as an accommodation with the New Deal, not any reversal (and even then Dems got outlandish Congressional majorities in reaction). And anyone who was around during Watergate could never honestly say the press wasn't generally on the side of "nail the bastard" -- though in a far less open way than they were during the Clintgon witch-hunt.

What Bartlett, especially, misses, is that this changed in late Carter and certainly during the Reagan administration. Many reporters were still themselves liberal, but Reagan's decisive win in '80 (in the shadow of Nixon's no-longer-fluky '72 landslide) persuaded them they were out of touch with most Americans (as, sad to say, they probably were), and led to the GOP-favoring interpretation of the landscape we see today.

The problem as I see it was not so much the mainstream coverage during the Clinton years, vile though it was -- you could half-forgive the establishment for clinging to its "GOP rules by divine right" view, given the way Perot's vote muddied the outcomes of both '92 and '96 (I know the polls say Clinton would have won without him, but polls are only polls; votes are what pundits study). The problem is, the election last year wa the Dem equivalent of 1980 for the GOP: clear evidence the old coalition was dead, and the country was set on a new direction. Yet the press has not reset itself the way it did in 1981. It's not only not pointing left (as the populace is), it continues to insist against all evidence that we still point right -- which is why lunatics screaming about non-existent death panels get treated as seriously as Henry Kissinger.

Those on our side may differ about WHY this is -- the corporate-owned premise can't be ignored -- but for me the very fact that it IS true is what's remarkable.

shorter "castanea" :

despite mouthing platitudes about how really and cooly leftist i am, and without explaining why a non-public option containin' health reform policy is just the tehest coolest... i do know that all you other lefties suck "big time." and it's ALL YOUR FAULT, lefties... Humph! (stomps little foot)

castanea, your idiocy really made my day... thx and wink wink...

"How about democrats going out to the media and tell the stories of Americans like me who have health insurance and are still burried under a mountain of medical bills?"

***

How about YOU going out to the media and telling the stories of Americans like you who have health insurance and are still buried under a mountain of medical bills?

Honestly, people who whine about the perceived shortcomings of health care reform and then who criticize Obama and Democrats who are actually PUSHING FOR REFORM while doing nothing to get their own stories into the media make me sick.

"castanea": Honestly, people who whine about the perceived shortcomings of health care reform and then who criticize Obama and Democrats who are actually PUSHING FOR REFORM while doing nothing to get their own stories into the media make me sick.

gee, i'm worried... hope you got health insurance.

I think Alain has a point. Unless and until progressives are adept at crafting simple, stick-in-the-mind word-pictures (similar to the right's "pulling the plug on Grandma"), and absent any slight interest on the part of Gregory et al. in functioning as true moderators or fact-checkers, we end up attempting to fight wingers' Macy's-parade balloon-caricature arguments with reasoned analysis and process arguments, and it just ain't working. (Although I'll say that Rachel did great against Armey using nothing more than facts and passion. But Armey, the old mountebank, merely smiled at her patronizingly and launched back into the rubber-simpleton arguments he'd come there to enunciate, completely unfazed by mere fact. Impressive performance, in its way.)

Of course the media was far from left-leaning in the period Bartlett cites; it's just that well-traveled, well-educated urbanites with broad perspectives are never going to satisfy aggressively provincial conservatives, and there's no way to have an even marginally competent national & international news operation without them. Or any kind of operation, really; that's why the right has to rely on jetsetters pretending to represent the angry peasants in order to provide even fake journalism. Rationalism is so elitist, doncha know?

I guarantee that the GOP elite, in politics and in media, are not cultural/religious fundamentalists, because they wouldn't be able to do their jobs if they really were like the rubes to whom they cater. They're just rich and privileged enough to not be forced to care about the cultural BS-- their pet gays can hire enough lawyers to protect themselves & their partners against crazy relatives, and their women can afford to get discreet abortions whether Roe is in effect or not, after all, so why not throw scraps to the fundie mobs? They've got theirs, and depriving rank & file Americans of the rights they can purchase just makes their privilege all that much sweeter.

See, neill is a swell little case study of exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm not a leftist, I'm a liberal, for starters, which is kind of like being a leftist, only I'm gainfully employed and able to donate money to the causes and candidates of my choice who actually have a chance of getting elected and instituting change, gradual though it may be.

This is in stark contrast to folks such as neill, who apparently think criticizing the people who are actually trying to get health care reform through Congress is an act that will somehow result in the perfect bill getting passed.

Unlike some of the leftists who post here, I guess I'm sort of keyed into the fact that there is still a lot of change to be made in the next three and a half years. Do you guys think that ranting about Obama being a corporate shill is more likely to get public support for other policies (e.g., climate change legislation, to name but one) in the coming years?

Or do you think, as I do, that it will only help rightwingers and their media enablers promote the "Obama is a failure" meme?

If you don't have the ability to understand that portraying any health care reform except your precious public option as a failure and a capitulation to corporatism will weaken the broad progressive cause, by all means slap a "Nader in '12" sticker on the bumper of your Volvo and help usher in the Age of Romney.

Oh, and neill (or any other leftist)? Feel free to quit your day job and run for public office, so you can effect change from the inside. You'll have to raise money, of course, which will entail soiling yourselves with special interests, but if you actually gave as much of a damn about your beliefs as you portray from your keyboards, it should be worth it.

I'll gladly chip in a few bucks, and I'd probably even vote for you.

The problem is that Bartlett, an eminently reasonable conservative, has no problem with FOX broadcasting lies as facts. Nor that it is in the forefront of employing and broadcasting screamers.

How reasonable.

The New York based national news sources in the early to mid 60's, which comprised virtually all national news, did have a liberal bias. There is no doubt about it. They universally supported civil rights.

Deep thoughts

1) You try to satisfy everybody you end up satisfying no one.

2) You stand tall in the saddle, argue strongly for your views and people will at least respect you even if they oppose you and condemn you. Basically: People respect strength. They always have they always will. That's Human Nature 101.

Deep questions

1) When Obama caves on the public option will Russ and Glenn and Billy-0 hoot and holler and bray and happy fart all over the DIMS and Obama's collapse?

2) The answer to #1 is "Fuck yes." Guess who is going to have to pay IMMEDIATE PENANCE for that? The Dims will lose the midterms and rightly so. Everyone loathes a milk-sop that enjoys being stepped on and has no spine. (Human Nature 101).

Deep Editorial

As far as my politics on health care go: Anybody who believes the private health care industry won't find a way to cheat the "new system" is a Palin-level dope. If you think the CEOS and the corporate board won't figure a to keep their 20-million-a-year salaries, private jets, triple homes in the country, stock options, etc, etc, you are a beltway ass-sucker. Nothing will be solved. This Bill will just kick the can down the street...

Deep Aphorism

Public policy in the US can only be as smart as the dumbest republicans in Congress.

Good luck with that America...
The advantage I can see to that is: At least Global warming doesn't exist...

lol... you are so fucked...

"I guarantee that the GOP elite, in politics and in media, are not cultural/religious fundamentalists, because they wouldn't be able to do their jobs if they really were like the rubes to whom they cater."

***

No doubt. You get at a much larger social issue that can best be described by a catchphrase I heard years ago: "If you are making under a hundred grand and still voting Republican, you are nothing more than a water boy for the rich."

The big challenge to crushing the rightwing entails eroding a critical mass of the white, suburban and rural voters who vote Republican for perceived social benefits, all to the detriment of their pocketbooks.

That's one reason that any decent health care reform at all would be a victory. The more wedges we drive between the rich and the people who vote to support the whims of the rich, the better off we'll all be.

Probably even neill.

At present this benefits the right because they are out of power and need not take responsibility for actions by the administration.

This is bullshit. The right-wing behaved exactly the same way when they were in power.

The right-wing is alliance between the corporate ruling class and the white working class. The only way that the ruling class can maintain this alliance is through propaganda that convinces the white working class that some one other than the ruling class is responsible for all the miseries in their lives. America is so diverse that there are many opportunities for exploitation of divisions, most of which are more apparent than real. Race, ethnicity, religion, sex, and general fear of the unknown future.

Modern mass media, particularly television and radio, serve the interests of those who own them and control available information. Facts are not as important as the characterization of the facts and the characterization/definition of the source of the facts. And there is not and never will be any opposition voices. There is no "liberal" mass media. People other than the ruling class do not own any mass media.

The explanation for why things are the way they are is that the way things are serves the interests of the ruling class. If it didn't, they would change it.

The hysteria about pulling the plug on grandma is coming from people supporting the status quo --which actually is pulling the plug on grandma.

Republicans can't see past their own mirrors and exploit their mental problems remarkably well.

The people who are pulling the plug on grandma are complaining that she might survive.

The solution to the problem is making them self-conscious of the problem which causes hysteria.

Lobbyist organized gangs can't see past their own mirrors, what they're complaining about is the present problem.

I disagree with the notion that Fox needs an ideological rival network, or that this would provide a balance. People who want to hear certain things would then tune into Fox, people who want to hear certain other things would tune into the liberal equivalent, and no one would have their preconceptions challenged.

Someone like Bartlett, and this is just a hunch, probably will perceive impartial factual analysis as "liberal bias" because so much of the right-wing ideology is refuted by facts. Hence Colbert's famous joke about reality having a liberal bias.

I think the answer here is really simple

As cable news networks had more time to fill, they made a obvious discovery:

Opinions are cheaper then facts

Since the far right already had an extensive infrastructure devoted to formulating and disseminating opinions, they were the ones to benefit

Well, assuming it's still possible to tell lies from truth, how about if we regulate the publication of lies? You know, not outlaw them -- the Supreme Court said lying's okay by them -- but inspect, label, and control them as we do with salmonella. Or we could re-imagine lies as a negative externality in the arena of public information. We could treat them like carbon dioxide and create a rights exchange for them -- I call it "crap and trade".

I have a pithy, yet inciteful comment to add to the cable TeeVee dicussion here-

OOPS! There's a LIVE car chase on the LA freeway- gotta go!

lol... you are so fucked...

The problem is that if America is fucked, other countries of the world will also suffer.

It's not only impolite to do nothing but snigger from the sidelines, buddy -- it can be downright dangerous. Not just for us. For YOU.

It all stems from the fact that states with small populations have a disproportionate influence in the senate. In general, this is not a problem, but most people born in those states who have the potential to be high wage earners tend to move to CA, NY, etc. So you are left behind with a very distorted population group that will always send extremist people to the senate and seek out extremist radio show hosts. If all the radio shows hosts and the senators we do not like were to vaporize, we would see their exact ideological replicas in no time.

The "liberal" press was notoriously fond of morons lke Reagan and Gingrich and really hasn't shown much love for liberal democrats since the 60s. Why does Bartlett embrace the canard of the liberal media? I think the answer might shed some light on the original question as well.

It's easy enough to explain why there's no liberal equivalent in the media to Fox: look who owns it.

The moment this country decided on what form of ownership we would entrust our airwaves to, its character became a foregone conclusion.

Bartlett: "MSNBC seems to be trying to fill this role, but very half-heartedly for reasons I am unclear about."

"Unclear"? Just ask GE!

Bartlett is really sharp.

Cable news. It's a "Crossfire" world now.

Fox and MSNBC. As long as "Morning Joe" is on for 3 hours every day, MSNBC is nothing like Fox.

"The rise of talk radio was the foundation." Was and still is. Hard to over-state its importance. It's everywhere, with little liberal counterpart. These stations are on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Millions and millions of working class and middle income people listen for hours and hours. Mail carriers for the post office learn to hate government, as do retirees on Social Security and Medicare. It's all emotional: wave the flag, support the troops, hate (or at least resent) blacks or browns or gays, worship God and guns, nobody likes taxes, we're the real victims.

Mainstream media. The Repubs worked the refs, so to speak, and by the 80s and 90s had largely won. In addition, big media people went from being news men and women working in the news profession to produce newspapers and reports to being wealthy celebrities working for a big corporation and appearing on shows. I used to think that it was the nature of "news" itself that imparted what Bartlett says was a liberal bias. The natural focus, by definition, is on the new over the traditional. Moreover, there is a tendency to highlight problems -- in need of a solution -- over every-day happenings. I found myself recently wondering when we would see the 3-hour, prime-time "Health-Care in America" special on ABC (with one segment devoted to problems, another to solutions around the world, a third to best practices across the country, etc.), then realized that in today's world it probably will not happen. No problems here -- and if there are any, let's get the Crossfire thing going. David Gregory today: what a waste. Two Dems, two Repubs. Nothing new (and when there was a hint of something interesting, no follow-up). Just back and forth. And, much as I love Rachel Maddow, she's on every weeknight now, plus she has a radio show. Her views are out there. Where are the experts, the scholars? What a waste. Can't wait until next Sunday to find out what John McCain thinks.

I think that liberals have a couple of advantages over conservatives going forward. One is that conservatives have got themselves crossways with modern science. Their base is anti evolution, anti stem-cell research, anti climate change, anti peak oil, and anti Big Bang. They are at odds with biology, genetics, climatology, geology, physics, and astronomy. With a few exceptions, perhaps, liberals are open to new evidence regarding whatever, and willing to go where the facts lead. Conservatives are tied down to fundamentalist religion and old racial and ethnic and gender/identity divisions, plus the rantings of Rush and his emotion-driven "ditto-heads." They have nothing positive to offer, unless you count cutting taxes some more, just as Jesus would have done, or finding some dark-skinned person to tase or torture.

There's not much room in today's Repub Party for thoughtful conservatives such as Bartlet, David Frum, or Andrew Sullivan.

How is it possible for everyone to overlook the fact that the mainstream media are HUGE CORPORATIONS, and that as HUGE CORPORATIONS they will naturally encourage conservative, pro-business viewpoints? Moreover, if even extreme rightwing viewpoints that they don't share (e.g., can help fight opposing viewpoints that birtherism) they want to defeat, they won't mind giving that extreme rightwing viewpoint airtime.

Compare that to the situation where a progressive challenge tries to find a forum on the air. Then, it's crickets or (if the challenge can't be ignored) apologetics (see practically any scandal of the previous 8 years).

That's why it's absurd for Bartlett to blandly recommend that progressives fund their own FOX counterpart (even assuming he meant honest FOX counterpart). Not only are barriers to entry impossibly high, there's simply no progressive pocket deep enough to fund the idea (unless George Soros is willing, and I'm not sure how on board he is with the progressive agenda generally).

He is perceptive to note MSNBC's half-hearted attempt to counter FOX. This only proves my point. What MSNBC is doing in Olberman and Maddow is, I'm sorry to say, define the permissible limits of progressive debate and turn liberals into manipulable versions of their wingut counterparts. Somerby has been documenting this for weeks now. Rather than have a serious, progressive person on her show like Naomi Klein (one appearance) or do a sustained discussion of health care policy, she dotes on numbskulls like Ana Marie Cox and tittering gossip about Republicans. There is little effort to actually mobilize and inform her viewers; instead the idea seems to be to foster as much complacency as possible. Ergo, her tedious segment about the GOP in Exile. As Bartlett understands: What "Exile"?

Er, make that

"...don't share (e.g., birtherism), can help fight opposing viewpoints that they want to defeat, "...

"The one thing I admire about the rightwing is that conservatives are politically savvy enough to present a unified front when they need to."

Tricorder analysis, Spock?

It would appear, Captain, that the right-wing held out for everything, maintained a united front and thereby compromised on nothing, and got everything.

"The left cannot, and so instead of suppporting any feasible health care reform because it represents a step in the right direction, some leftists will continue their purity tests and reject everything that doesn't conform to what they, in their apparent infinite wisdom, think health care reform should be."

Fascinating. Contrary to the previous statement, it appears that the problem for the democrats is that the leftists are insisting on using the proven winning no-compromise strategy, when they should be settling for less.

That sounds...highly illogical, Mr Spock.

Indeed, Captain.

castanea, you may have a point about realistic goal setting and I've made it too, but w/o the putdowns of those who have good reason to be irritated at what we actually get. However, you should realize that the Gang of Six is rather horrible and not just a bunch of "compromisers" set on good-faith middling reform. Look at this psychopath Enzi who is actually trying to make things even worse:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_treatment/archive/2009/08/06/exclusive-time-to-vote-enzi-off-the-island.aspx

1) You try to satisfy everybody you end up satisfying no one.
OK, then let's don't satisfy the far right, the anti-reform militants and the insurance companies.

You are right about people despising the spineless, not a clue about AGW ...

BTW, should we just have to accept the crappy status quo? And if the government provided a public option, there just wouldn't be a cash flow to pay those big salaries.

What is left out of this discussion is "Media consolidation". When 6 corporations own all the MSM and will never say or do anything that would in any way demean their corporate interests then there is no way out of this "death spiral" because there are no "liberal" corporations. Corporations are by nature conservative profiteers and the monopolies that exist are for profiteering so the media will never have a "liberal" corporate owner.

No foreigner should ever be able to own MSM in America (goodbye Murdock)for security reasons.
End media consolidation so media owners cannot have ownership in any other businesses due to a conflict of interests while broadcasting in the public's interests.

It has become common practice with FOX and others to use the law to break the law ignoring the "spirit" of the law and why it was created but rather using it to shield themselves from being interfered with.

It is coming to the point where trying to start a civil war and incite people to violence and murder cannot be stopped by legal means and will begin attracting violence to itself as citizens begin to see who is causing the situation. It is clear that Hate radio and Fox news have divided the nation with misinformation and propaganda and it is also clear that if Fox were no more and Rush, Savage, Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly were silenced the nation would begin to be less motivated to curse each other.

Some will immediately say, well what about Olbermann and Maddow but I challenge anyone to find a single incidence of these two knowingly lying to the public or inciting people to violence and murder. If the media has a liberal bias it's because the constitution has a liberal bias as well as the Bill of Rights.

Sadly the genie cannot go back in the bottle so unless we dismantle media consolidation, change the rules for media ownership and make it a law with consequences for newscasters to knowingly lie on the air to the public...violence will be the end result...sooner or later. We are battling a fascist corporatocracy in order to maintain our democracy and corporations are not people and should not be treated as such.

I thought it was an incredibly insightful analysis (actually, both sections) from the conservative perspective. Did he list every single reason for the situation? No. But there actually WAS a liberal media bias up through the 1970's, and I mean liberal in the same sense that Cronkite meant it. That's fodder for a whole other post.

The media started tilting conservative during Reagan, actually just before Reagan. Was it perfectly liberal before that? No. But there were liberal ideas and liberal stories and liberal slant that did get ink and airtime up until Reagan.

I doubt we will ever get our own traditional "liberal" media the way Fox is the conservative megaphone. But we've staked out the internet and let's hope the "traditional" media dies sooner rather than later. In my mind there is no way to repair that corrupt industry. Better let it die off, and we should help give it a shove over the cliff at every opportunity.

The MSM media doesn't treat the GOP as if it's been discredited because the MSM is a business, and profit is the name of the game.

You want the GOP to be discredited, DIY.

Political power like all other power accrues to those who work to acquire it. Stop the whining, and organize.

If you watch FOX, or visit their site, you are part of the problem. If you are not constantly finding ways to persuade your family, friends, neighbors, associates to avoid the sludge, you are not part of the solution.

"...The answer to #1 is "Fuck yes." Guess who is going to have to pay IMMEDIATE PENANCE for that? The Dims will lose the midterms and rightly so. Everyone loathes a milk-sop that enjoys being stepped on and has no spine. (Human Nature 101)...."-koreyel

Yes, if Obama fails we will all want to go right back to Bush to punish those stupid weak dems. We will want to go right back to the party leaders who brought us this current disaster...give them another chance to completely drive us over the cliff...yeah that's what we'll do 'cause "We're mad as hell and want to cut more taxes on the rich"...yeah that's the ticket.

Give me Obama care or give me a Palin death panel...yeah that's the ticket...deep thoughts indeed.

Fascinating how relativism so dominates our discourse. Bartlett doesn't consider any difference between truth and lie in the news, and Benen doesn't bring the point up, and only a handful of the commenters trouble to mention it.

Whatever the biases of Cronkheit, et al, they WERE trying to tell the truth and follow a cultural standard that distinguished between truth and lie, reason and unreason.

Bartlett, like most of his political generation and the current media generation, considers politics and news to be a show, a scam, or a sales pitch--none of them processes being judged as "true" or "false."

Posted by: MikeBoyScout on August 16, 2009 at 5:57 PM

Agreed. That is what me and my friends do and none of us ever watch cable news or any TV news. We get access to it through the sites we visit on the web. We seek the truth and the facts present themselves to support it...all through the internet. Most of us make it our responsibility to inform friends and neighbors. especially those filled with right wing talking points. Several in my family alone keep sending me viral emails which I take the time to debunk. They are all hung up on abortion issues and would vote for Hitler if he promised to end abortions.

The truth has a liberal bias. So to does democracy, spirituality and morality. Selfishness, greed and self seeking has a conservative bias. So does fascism and a corporatocracy.

But you've hit the way right on the head. It's how 12 step programs work...it begins with one person sharing their experience strength and hope with another and this is true of politics as well. It is how the truth is spread...sharing facts, not lies and fears, one person to another. Unfortunately, that is also how propaganda is spread. So show up and spread what you know is truth...but first get the facts. You are spot on.

from the 1950s through the 1990s there was a liberal bias in the media.

That's just silly. Of course there was a bias, but it was a corporatist/centrist bias, tilting slightly to the right. Both the left and the extreme right were always seen by mainstream media as dangerous, to the extent that both challenged the status quo. That's a major blind spot for Bartlett and calls into question the rest of his thesis.

"Several in my family alone keep sending me viral emails which I take the time to debunk."

***

This brings up an interesting tangent. I cannot recall seeing a single viral email that contained lies that supported the liberal mindset, and yet I can think of more than a few off the top of my head that contained lies to support a conservative mindset (such as the one that showed a photograph of Obama without his hand over his heart during the pledge or the national anthem, with the accompanying narrative claiming that he is therefore not a real American).

This sort of person-to-person communication via email is yet another way that the rightwing maintains its echo chamber by swapping myths.

Does anyone know of any quantitative analysis of these sorts of emails? Or of the prolonged effects that these emails have on a person's opnion formulation?

In other words, even if the email is subsequently debunked, is there a likelihood that a person who formed a negative opinion about, say, Obama by reading the email will continue to have that negative opinion even when it is proved that Obama is not a Kenyan Muslim terrorist?

castanea, just dropped back in to wish you and the rest of the DLC a happy resurrection...

that's really what this country needs:
you blue dogs and the republicans...wah hoo! paradise!

whatta country!

If you don't have the ability to understand that portraying any health care reform except your precious public option as a failure and a capitulation to corporatism will weaken the broad progressive cause, by all means slap a "Nader in '12" sticker on the bumper of your Volvo and help usher in the Age of Romney.

Keep working on it and I'm sure you can come up with a comment that's even more snide than that. The absence of a public option means that insurance companies & pharma have no incentive to lower their already inflated costs. It should go without saying that this cripples the ability of any plan to accomplish one of the fundamental aims of health care reform -- controlling spending -- but I'll say it anyway, since it's apparently lost on some. It would have been one thing if Obama & other key Democrats had gone to the mat in explaining the purpose & necessity of a public option, then lost the public debate. But that's not what happened. They let the rabid right & corporate interests define the issue as euthanasia, and it swirled down the shitter from there. Make no mistake, healthcare "reform" will pass, but it will be a mere wisp of what it would have been had the administration & its allies made any attempt at the case for a public option.

Bjobotts, you are right in pragmatic, intellectual terms. But we evolved and still have creepy dominance-submission structures in our brains. People do revile weaklings and can vote for "strong" people even when not in their best interests.

In the 60s and 70s the national tv and radio was quite New York City (even the Mutual Broadcasting Network). When they talked about almost anything I could see that they were so wrapped up in their cosmopolitan life, that they couldn't understand how the wealth, morals, and opportunity they took for granted were in a whole different world from the ideas of the adults around me, who could wet their pants over Nixon. At the time, it was confusing and upsetting, in a great part, because I was young.

Looking back, I can confidently say, the media appeared to be liberal in the sense that they dealt with the reality of the audience which they had the closest contact, and they didn't promote, pander, or obsess over the infantile fantasies of wack-job conservatives out in the "hinterlands."

And I don't know how Bruce Bartlett could disagree with that definition, but it's sad that it can be the definition of liberal.

I was once at lunch with Ted Turner, just after 9/11, and during a talk about the Bush Administration's reaction he said, "I should have never let CNN go." (True story.) I think we all wish the same thing.

Bartlett fails to point out that the right made it their goal, their purpose, to demonize all sources of information which did not fit the cults, er, a, conservative ideology. Any media will leave room for criticism, but that mixed with the lies and misinformation, the right conscientiously turned any media not part of the conservative Borg into something evil to their followers - so no conservative would even consider any information source not approved.

This has put today's right under a form of information control, a major mind control technique.

That is, ultimately, the reason why the right is so reality free and proud of it. Today's conservatism is, no doubt, a national security problem for the nation. We have millions who can be told liberals want to kill Granny and they will swallow it. Not a good sign for any democracy. Bartlett is correct about one thing, this will only get worse. But he does not address the real reason - the nation will not admit the true problem.

"that's really what this country needs:
you blue dogs and the republicans...wah hoo! paradise!"

***

Aw, thanks. I appreciate your kindness even though I'm not a blue dog. Keep smiling though! And enjoy your political obscurity!

-----------

"They let the rabid right & corporate interests define the issue as euthanasia, and it swirled down the shitter from there. Make no mistake, healthcare "reform" will pass, but it will be a mere wisp of what it would have been had the administration & its allies made any attempt at the case for a public option."

Two points. First, the left was criticizing the administration about what it perceived as an undesirable attempt at reform long before Palin began communicating to the outside world via Facebook.

Second, perhaps the left would have been better served had it aligned itself from the get-go with the Obama administration. There is a lot of variation in memory, of course, but what I recall is that some on the left were already getting feverish about whether Obama would even address health care reform soon after he was elected.

Well, here we are in August and health care reform is the main focus of the administration ... and yet some on the left still aren't content. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell must be ecstatic. Every attack that the left makes on Obama means one less that they have to launch.

Would you rather have an imperfect reform, or no reform at all? Judging by the comments I've read above, many folks would prefer no reform at all. Fine. Just realize the political costs of a failure to institute even modest reform--polling numbers will drop, the media will create and amplify a failure meme, and every subsequent political battle will be that much more difficult. Climate change legislation? Forget about it.

If the media were objective (really--reporting what Palin writes on Facebook as if it had meaning?), if the rightwing weren't so fanatically ignorant, and if the Senate had stronger leadership, things might be vastly different. Ignoring reality has a cost. So does obsessing about perfect reform.

I too take issue with Bartlett claiming historical liberal bias in MM. He also says scholars tended to agree too much to make good tv, and that experts felt tv a poor format to get their point across. I wonder if the liberal bias he speaks of isn't just a variation of "facts have a liberal bias?"

castanea,

I agree with a lot of what you say. The key to health care reform is that it be universal, or all but universal. If it does not include a public option then the best competition model for lowering the rate of price increase is lost, but once a universal health insurance is passed and implemented, then it will be irreversible. The rapid increase in costs will then have to be dealt with separately.

Cost will have to be fixed and the choices boil down to (1) raise taxes, (2) decide which powerless minority on the "universal" health care will be sacrificed to cut costs, or (3) do something to create a system that controls costs - a public option being one of the most likely solutions to be tried.

I'd say (1) and (2) are non-starters. It would be very difficult to be a politician who gets reelected who championed either of those two choices. But first, there has to be a universal health care plan passed.

We'd be better off getting the whole package immediately,of course, but if has to be a choice, getting universal health care first is critical.

Rick B--

Your post sums it up perfectly. Clear the biggest hurdle--passage of reform--now, then fine tune the system after it has become an established part of the political landscape.

If a Democrat had gone behind a Republican president's back to negotiate with terrorists & trade arms for hostages, the media would have vilified that person and made sure they were disgraced for life. Instead, Ronald Reagan sold out his country in exactly that way and was elected to 2 terms by a fawning media.

The idea that the media was "liberal" in the 1980's is absurd in the extreme. Whatever liberal media bias there was decades ago, it all ended with Watergate. From then on ALL Republican crimes, no matter how egregious (arms for hostages, outing a CIA agent, starting a for-profit war, spying on the American public) have been given a free pass by the media. Conversely, whether there are actual scandals involving a Democratic president is completely irrelevant to the non-stop covering of pseudo-scandals by the media (Whitewater, Lewinsky, haircut-gate, birthers, death panels, etc.).

I have been saying for YEARS that the so-called Hollywood "liberal elite" desperately need to start a 24 hour news network since nothing like that has ever existed. To call MSNBC liberal when it's the home to Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, Nora O'Donnell, etc., etc., shows just far to the right ALL the 24 hour news networks are.

There is literally no such thing as being too far to the right on TV. Conversely, no matter how prescient and correct progressives such as Robert Scheer or Michael Moore have been, they are always deemed by the media to be "fringe" and outside acceptable discourse.

"Finally, the decline of the mainstream media because of the Internet and other economic forces has been critical to its loss of influence and standing. It no longer has the resources to pay reporters to look into things deeply and write about issues authoritatively.

Long before their resources dried up, mainstream media outlets had lost their will to look into things deeply and pretty much didn't care that their reporters didn't understand what they were writing about. (Take a look at Gannett's business model beginning in the 1980s).
But Gannett was far from alone. Basically the people running the companies lost sight of how their companies made money. The very short version is that they thought they made money by selling advertising, when what they were really selling was readers.

Also:

If you believe there was a liberal consensus in the country, it makes sense that mainstream media would appear liberal to a conservative (especially the crazy ones).

any legislation MUST HAVE A PUBLIC OPTION or else it will be declared a complete, total, utter failure

None of these countries uses a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends…The $64,000 question is whether America’s private health insurers would be willing to countenance the tight regulation required for that approach.

There is, arguably, a case to be made for not drawing a line in the sand on this or that specific aspect of health care reform (although, I'm all for line-drawing, personally). But, as junebug says, notwithstanding the presence of the right-wing media machine, Obama hasn't made the case for the essential components of various effective health care packages (e.g., "We can achieve our goals with a strong public option or through a tightly regulated private insurance market"), although he's paid lip service to figuring out "how to get that deal" (the far lower per capital costs in other countries). In that sense, he's missing a crucial opportunity to inform the public and frame the issues.

"Cause, you know, listening to people who actually know what they are talking about, who have studied the issues and have come to a consensus about the correct course makes no sense - after all, we cannot have any fighting in the war room."

tsquared has this point absolutly right. The truth is, overall we live in a pretty good world. The problems with easy answers have been solved, our modern problems are complex, nuanced and difficult, defying easy answers.

This situation is such a bad fit for the modern media environment that, I believe, experts and scientists are not just ignored but, as we saw in the Bush administration, villified as the killjoys who 'stand in the way of 'fixing' the nations problem' through the simple jingoistic answers that are given in the media and sound bites.

When these simple answers like 'getting tough on (fill in your problem)' fail, as with the Bush administration, there cannot be a problem with the answer, but instead there must be a nefarious plot, and the already identified villians and allies, blocking the way.

"This has led to a deterioration in discourse that benefits those most willing to be outrageous. At present this benefits the right because they are out of power..."

Were they any less outrageous when they were in power, during the Bush years?

This bit is bs

"It (the mainstream media) no longer has the resources to pay reporters to look into things deeply and write about issues authoritatively."

They have plenty of money. It has been demonstrated time and again how easy it is to do the minor fact-checking that would make mainstream news _much_ better. If Media Matters can pay somebody to do that, then certainly CNN, the Washington Post, CBS News, etc. could pay somebody to do this job properly.

They just don't do it.

TV news has been putting celebrity ahead of news quality since the 80s. And the newspapers are following the TV + cable networks into the ditch, based on the fallacious logic that if they did _their_ news just like the TV networks do, then they would hold onto market share. It's a losing proposition for the dead tree market simply because the medium is too slow.

gawd,
there's a bevy of blue dogs in the house stinking up the place...

and that rick b... what a genius... that a politcian would never decide a powerless minority wont get health care... hah!

the telltale 'moderate' bait and switch...that screws us every time..."woops, about that almost universal health care folks, welp, you see..."

just ask california.

you guys are a) liars indeed working for the corporations; or 2) idiots digging thru horse shit looking for a pony

good luck with all that...

"The media's often ridiculous savaging of the Clinton presidency, I believe, proves otherwise."

No it does not.

Clinton was from the South, and the upper East coast and west coast media moguls have always found it acceptable to look down on white southerners. They did the same thing to LBJ and Truman.

Clinton was the object of suspicion from the beginning because he was Southern, not because he was liberal. The mainstream media preferred Harkin, and then Tsongas.

If Bartlett thinks that "... scholars will tend to agree with each other too often to make good television" he needs to start watching the most informative, smart news program on tv, Fareed Zakaria's GPS on CNN Sunday, mid-day.

Unfortunately, it is mostly about important international stuff rather than about whether or not death panels will pull the plug on Grandma.

"But Armey, the old mountebank, merely smiled at her patronizingly ..."

Correction: Armey smiled PAST her. He would NOT look directly at her. I guess he was worried he could catch teh gay from her.

I read through the comments quickly so I apologized if this was posted. Another thing Barlett misses is the inherent nature of both sides- liberals like to hear different opinions and modify accordingly- it is the innate nature of liberalism- conservatives- not so much. Thus they tend to be caught in an echo chamber of their own making (Barlett is an exception that proves the rule-look how he has been margilized).

Would you rather have an imperfect reform, or no reform at all? Judging by the comments I've read above, many folks would prefer no reform at all.

Stop with the false binaries. You continue to distort the argument that's been presented to you over & over again. Despite your bogus framing, the point is not perfect reform or none at all. The point is that many of us wanted to see Obama argue clearly & forcefully for *strong* reform, and then see how far his argument would go in achieving that goal. In spite of the fact that he knew that a public option would be fiercely opposed by those interested in the status quo, Obama presented neither a clear nor a forceful argument for it. It's one thing when you fight for an issue and come away with less than you wanted; it's a completely different thing when you don't even get to the fighting part because you haven't bothered to explain the issue & its importance. For all the energy & clarity he brought to the issue of a public option, it might as well have been an afterthought. All of this is particularly maddening because of the fact that Obama was coming at healthcare reform from a position of relative strength. He had the benefit of learning from Clinton's missteps, his approval ratings were solid, & polling clearly indicated that the public was -- is -- interested in reform. Apparently, you're perfectly happy with just crossing the finish line when you have a wind at your back, but some of us would like to use that wind to go further & faster.

Fox News would be an irritant if it were _just_ partisan: always asking uncomfortable questions, always pursuing issues that aren't Democratic priorities, etc. Say they kept hammering Obama about why the economy hasn't improved faster, or on Israel and Iran, or the like. I'd still hate it, but it would fulfill some kind of legitimate newsgathering and contrarian purpose.

But they're not just partisan. They also just plain lie, like by airing Glenn Beck's paranoid fantasies about FEMA internment camps and how the Cars.gov website takes over your computer and the many other signs of the coming liberal-fascist apocalypse. It's made up. There was a time when you couldn't just make shit up and call it "news."

Why cable news in general is a waste of time to watch has to do with how much time is spent staging already-well-rehearsed clashes between professional partisans. But the worst part is the fear-mongering and lies.

Nancy Irving,

No, the conservatives were no more outrageous when they were in power than they are now. The difference is that when in power they could be blamed for the outcome fo the idiocies they promoted. They have no such responsibility now. Obama and the Democrats get all the blame for any failure.

neill,

Any minority large enough to save the kinds of money that would be needed to save a health care system that has financially run out of control is a minority that is large enough to be politically dangerous to the politicians who cross them.

This is national health care in a nation of over 330 million people. It's the 16% who are uninsured that is at the base of this current argument, and no minority much smaller than that is large enough to be a significant savings if the politicians cut them out of the system. But it would take at least that many to make cutting people out of the system a useful way of limiting costs.

We're talking large numbers here. A few individuals here and there do not matter much when policy at this level is being considered. That's just reality.

just to pick a nit or two in what you said. I didn't like the snide tone either, but there was a kernel of truth in what castanea said.
You can certainly accuse ``other key Democrats'' of cowardice but this inclination to savage Obama as inept or corrupt for essentially not being a magician has been coming from the left since before he took office. It's a pure denial of the political reality Obama is dealing with. He says he wanted a public option, he worked his *ass* off to make it happen, it didn't because he does not have perfect control of his party the way Bush and Reagan did.
That's a fact. Until every Blue Dog and chicken-hearted so-called ``liberal'' -- are you listening Dianne Feinstein? -- is replaced by a real progressive this same crap is going to continue to happen. Where the hell was anybody besides Obama and an embarrassingly few others in countering the lunatic juggernaut?
Where I differ completely from castanea is in his assertion that a non-public option health care reform is somehow going to open the way to real reform. That is pie-in-the-sky thinking. The last great initiative -- Bush's sweetheart deal for Pharma masquerading as a prescription drug plan for seniors -- should have been a platform Dems could have taken advantage of, but instead it has served as a Trojan Horse for the right wing that still exercises veto power in this country. Now the right can claim the damaged fiscal structure of Medicare as an excuse to demagogue anything real despite having done most of the damage themselves. This bill accomplishes ``precious'' little.
Bitter liberals need to get off Obama's back and climb on to Feinstein's and the rest of the posers and fence-sitting assholes who kept their mouths firmly shut when they could have been giving the president some help. This one is on weaklings like Feinstein, Reid, Hoyer and over-the-hill mouthpieces like James Carville, who took a crap on the public option and gave political cover to the Blue Dogs. At least Pelosi had the stones to speak up once or twice.

Junebug: ''but I'll say it anyway, since it's apparently lost on some. It would have been one thing if Obama & other key Democrats had gone to the mat in explaining the purpose & necessity of a public option, then lost the public debate. But that's not what happened. They let the rabid right & corporate interests define the issue as euthanasia, and it swirled down the shitter from there. Make no mistake, healthcare "reform" will pass, but it will be a mere wisp of what it would have been had the administration & its allies made any attempt at the case for a public option.''

A couple of points about Bartlett's thoughtful take.
1) at least he is a thinking conservative, a very rare animal these days.
2) Fox News does indeed pretend to be other than a GOP mouthpiece. A visit to, say, any retirement home in San Diego would probably offer ample proof that Fox viewers think they are getting unbiased news instead of the endless stream of crap that happens to match their conservative sensibilities.
3) A counterpart to FOX would be a channel devoted to distortions, character assassinations and slavish distribution of talking points from a well-funded and completely dishonest liberal political establishment. Liberals and lefties by nature are not dishonest, as their right-wing counterparts in fact, are, they don't generally have a whole lot of money, they're not trying to assume power over EVERYTHING -- ergo, there cannot be a counterpart to FOX even if one of the media conglomerates bought into such an idea, which would never happen in a million years.
4) The present day mainstream media is not centrist, not in the least. Even if its staffers think or pretend to themselves that they are liberal, the SCLM unfailingly offers the conservative side no matter how disingenuous, demonstrably false, loony or potentially violent it is. They do not seek or present the liberal side in anything like the compulsive way they present the right. Bartlett might want to reexamine his own sensibilities to see if he has abandoned conservatism as much as he thinks the new conservatives have abandoned him. And he might want to sit down and watch a broadcast of ``centrist'' mainstream media news with a liberal now and then.

"Another problem is simply human nature. "Crazy" will always have far more entertainment potential than "sane." Freddie Kruger has grossed billions. Beatrix Potter -- not so much"

Err - sorry Dalloway. It's not "human nature". It's the nature of citizens of the USA

The discussion here between castanea on one side and neill and Forrest, on the other is fascinating (to quote Spock). castanea's point is that *if* we want to make steady progress, then we need lots of little, incremental improvements. Take wins where you can. The alternative view is that being wimpy---going for compromise instead of trying for it all---fails to inspire, and fails to earn the respect of either your allies or your enemies.

I think that both points are correct. The go-for-broke approach of the conservatives sometimes wins big (Reagan, Bush II) and sometimes loses big (their current loss of power in the White House, the Senate and the House).

The Democrats adopted the go-for-broke strategy twice, with the New Deal under FDR and with the Great Society under Johnson.

I have no idea which strategy works best in the long run, but being willing to go for it all is, for some reason, harder for liberals. With rare exceptions, elected officials go the incremental route. My guess as to the reason is again corporate America---they have the funds to nourish the conservative cause during their time out of power, but there is no correspondingly deep-pocketed benefactor for liberals. Liberals feel they must play nice to survive (politically).

Another point about the different dynamic of conservative versus liberal politics. As Bartlett pointed out, conservatives can live completely in a cocoon in which they are NEVER exposed to the first progressive thought (except as filtered and distorted through Rush Limbaugh, et al). What this means is that there is NO possibility of converting conservatives through a carefully crafted argument, an appealing pitch. They will never HEAR such a pitch, no matter how persuasive.

The reverse is not true. Liberals hear conservative voices, and conservative arguments, everywhere.

What this means is that the ONLY way to win over conservatives is one by one, as some poor working stiff becomes disgusted by the conservative side and actively seeks out an alternative. I don't know what, if anything we can do to speed up this process.

This is not about Republicans, it is about Democrats. Bartlet says, "liberals still treat the mainstream media as if it does" represent their values. He is completely correct. Whether it ever did is beside the point.

It is infuriating to hear Democrats who work on the political OR legislative side - who do this for a living - quote snippets from the Post and Politico back and forth to each other as if they contained nuggets of revealed truth, and the quoters were ever so deeply informed to be saying these things.

Let me give a horrifying example with, as Bob Somerby never tires of pointing out, profound and disgusting historical consequences. After a year of endless pounding by the mainstream media, Bill Clinton had a 66% approval rating from the general public on the day he was impeached.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post told us that Clinton was thoroughly discredited, so Al Gore acted acoordingly, snubbed Clinton and basically ran as an insurgent against 8 years of peace and prosperity, instead of taking credit for it and attacking the lunatics who impeached Clinton.

So, did this lead the media to praise and support Gore for truckling to them? No, they told lies about him which cost him the election. And to this very day, Democratic apparatchiks in every Democratic office on Capitol Hill eagerly open the Post and Politico to get the "inside scoop." And yet, they always seem to make us depressed and eager to surrender before there is a fight.

Nice story, how does that fit into the fact that we won the Senate, the House, and the presidency. The internet is our new media, it's the talk radio for liberals.

I think the issue of late is the the unhinged scaring almost all main street media into he said/she said reporting instead of actual reporting (I meant street, not stream). They have plenty of resources to fact check and choose not to do so and that has nothing to do with talent and/or resources.

I think the problem is that the News is a business and like Hearst of years ago, he who owns the media owns the message. Make any company using the term 'News' a not-for-profit and the incentive for spin will be greatly reduced.

It all stems from the fact that states with small populations have a disproportionate influence in the senate. In general, this is not a problem, but most people born in those states who have the potential to be high wage earners tend to move to CA, NY, etc. So you are left behind with a very distorted population group that will always send extremist people to the senate and seek out extremist radio show hosts.

First of all, there are about as many Democratic small states as Republican small states. It evens out.

Second, small states do not send more extremists to Congress than large states. Rick Santorum didn't come from a small state. Nor Jean Schmidt. Nor Michelle Bachmann.

With regard to Grassley, I think you need to return an earlier post listing the four voting groups:

Republicans (who will always vote against every proposal simply for political or financial reasons),
Maine's Senate Delegation (who, if convinced, might pull in a conservative Democrat),
Centrist and Conservative Democrats (who require a serious spanking), and
Progressive Democrats (who believe in principle over policy or politics).

Regardless what he says or how hard he says he works to build a “bipartisan compromise”, Grassley is a Republican and will not vote for reform—in any form. Obama, Emmanuel, Baucus, everyone, knows this.

We need a good come-back, an excellent talking point on obstructionism, one that the bobbleheads are forced to voice over and over again. I’ll try out some that only Frank, Frankin, Whitehouse, or Rangle would be permitted to use:

“Frankly, Sen. Grassley is being disingenuous. He is a Republican and they are totally against change or reform on health care or climate change. If he were honest, he’d just say, ‘The status quo is fine with me.’ Oh, he’ll say something else, but only his vote counts. Ditto every other Republican. While this is disgusting in a democracy, it’s still true.”

“Name one Republican who has spoken the truth to his constituents on this issue. They say one thing on national television programs their base will never watch then hand out a book by Glen Beck and talk about ‘killing grandma’ when confronted by a raucous mob back home. There are only one hundred senators for all 300 million of us and you have a single representative. They should be talking about facts, not rumors.”

“Do you remember the Bush town halls when the public had to be preapproved before allowed in and where some citizens were jailed because they wore the wrong t-shirt? We have had law suits over the Republicans denying public access and even arresting people walking on the same street as peaceful demonstrators. Some Republicans are doing the same thing now.”

“Senator Grassley has a lot of power, but it’s manufactured. Yes, he one of one hundred who represent his state and he’s a member of the Gang of Six, but those six represent three percent of the US population and get more than 20 percent of the medical-insurance-pharmaceutical (MIP) funds. Do you really think he cares about any individual other than himself or any small business. He’s all talk.”

“Bipartisan, smartisan. The Republicans have a one pony circus and can’t even afford an immigrant to shovel up the crap.”

That should grab the MSM gonads. This looks like a good speechwriter game.