The Liberal Media? (Update 1)
From Left: Chris Matthews, Keith OlbermannIn my previous post on the topic of a possible liberal bias in the American news media, I promised to keep an eye out for relevant events. Well, it didn't take long to find one, now that NBC has pulled Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from their positions as anchors for all campaign events. It looks like my previous post's first bullet was on target in terms of this decision. I wrote that "The right wing has been so incredibly effective at painting the media as liberal. To counter this accusation, the media studiously avoids offending conservative sensibilities, and is thus co-opted."
In the Olbermann/Matthews case, all it took was a few days of whining from the McCain campaign about MSNBC's biased coverage, and a change was made. I will be the first to admit that Olbermann is liberally biased and Chris Matthews is just a nutcase, but I'd love to see an example of where the same kind of staffing decision has been made by a right-wing news organization (such as Fox News) under pressure from Democrats.
I'm quite sure Fox has never bowed to such entreaties, and likely never will. Why? I'd say it's because the conventional "wisdom" is that the media is liberal. Never mind that said conventional wisdom is a fiction planted and nurtured for decades by the right wing. With a prevalent narrative like that, NBC feels the heat when it's turned up by the Republican Noise Machine and Fox merely laughs it off as the insignificant threat it represents.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald fleshes out the argument I'm making in his post from earlier today.
posted by Zak at
12:14 PM
2 Comments:
Great post about Matthews and Olbermann!
You may be interested in these comments by Rick Perlstein...the best framing I've heard of what this election is really about....
Culture Wars
Has a culture war been declared in the presidential campaign? We look at some of the rhetoric from the two conventions with Rick Perlstein, a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America."
http://www.here-now.org/
9:44 AM
I watched some of the MSNBC coverage of the two conventions. There is no *question* that Olbermann and Matthews were way, way over-the-top and over-the-line in their anti-McCain coverage.
Here's the problem. Olbermann and Matthews are opinionated people. They're liberal. There's a place for both, but it's not as the anchors of a news broadcast. They're better served -- and serve their audience better -- as commentators.
I wonder if you've ever actually watched Fox? It is a conservative network, undeniably, but they do a better (not great, but better) job of differentiating their commentators from their news anchors and news broadcasts.
When Brit Hume is giving the nightly news, for example, he is pretty fair. The problem networks like Fox run into is when they bring in their "panels" to discuss and interpret the news, and that's when you see that the panel is fairly well stacked with conservative types. But flip the switch to CNN and the panels are stacked toward the left.
Here's the next problem. No one in this country trusts the news to be fair anymore. So what do we do? We look to the news outlet or outlets that reinfornce our worldview, because they're the ones we trust to filter the news correctly. Think about that, though -- it's a terrible idea. We're turning to people who are telling us what we want to hear. Liberal or conversative, none of us are really getting the unbiased truth. And that's just making the divide between red and blue America worse.
4:19 PM
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