Liberal Media Decries Republican Obstructionism By: shep

by shep

You can choose your lie there.

One, that you’ve heard the news that Republicans have broken the record for the use of filibusters (actually the threat thereof since Democrats are too spineless and stupid to make them actually filibuster) in a congressional term, in only half of one congressional term. Let me say that again: Republicans have broken the record for filibustering in half.

Now some people might think that our pathologically shallow, pampered poodles of The Village Press, who treat politics and public policy as a sporting game, would love to talk about a dramatically shattered record of partisan gamesmanship, especially since Republicans appear to be winning.

Ah, but there’s the rub. Republicans are only winning because the partisan denizens of the craft that once deserved to be called “journalism,” haven’t deigned to tell the rabble about it because then the jig would be up. Voters would know exactly why the peoples’ business was not being accomplished, disrupting the Republican plan to blame it on the Democrats. (They won’t even call it a filibuster when Republicans do it).

Which brings us to the second lie: that there is or ever has been anything resembling a liberal media. Any real liberal knows that there are very few liberal voices in the mainstream press (probably a good part of the reason for the rise of the netroots), and none with the exposure and radical extremism to counterbalance the likes of people such as Bill Kristol, Pat Buchanan, Bill O’Reilly or Lou Dobbs. Mild mannered, seldom seen commentators such as E. J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Bill Moyers and even Paul Krugman simple don’t compare. Keith Obermann can be fairly described as a liberal firebrand but that’s just one hour of cable (on MSNBC fer gawd’s sake) drowning in a sea of centrist to radical-right political rhetoric.

(I’m not counting what is the mostly liberal perspective of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert since they seldom offer a liberal viewpoint beyond making fun of conservatives and they freely advertise themselves as comedy shows).

Meanwhile, so-called liberal commentators with big megaphones, such as Joe Klein and Maureen Dowd propagate anti-Democratic, Republican propaganda with impunity and millionaire fatheads such as Brian Williams and Tim Russert, the ever-present bastions of Serious unbiased news, get to mug Democratic frontrunners while pretending to moderate a debate. And they conspicuously ignore, marginalize and, if necessary, ridicule progressive voices in politics, such as John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, even though they may be popular or even competitive with other candidates whom they treat with great Seriousness.

One more point: democratic liberalism – the belief in individual liberty rights and government in service of the common good through transparency, checks against abuse of power and clean and fair elections (rather than government in service of a greedy, war-mongering, power-grabbing class oligarchy) – is as mainstream as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, all the way up to the vast majority of Americans today. That may explain why the mainstream press has even lower approval than either President Bush or the Congress. That’s something else the illiberal media won’t tell you. Go figure.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]