It’s interesting to see how the right is trying to salve their conscience over what Andrew Breitbart did to Shirley Sherrod’s career and reputation. Even when they acknowledge the moral imperative for Breitbart to apologize they then turn right around and say that he shouldn’t under the circumstances. Here’s Scott Johnson from Powerline:
Yesterday I asserted that Andrew had made a mistake and owed Shirley Sherrod an apology. Whether I am right or wrong about that, I also think he is right to withhold it under the circumstances…
…With the hounds baying, Andrew deserves the support of conservatives in his struggle with the Democrat-Media complex.
One constant in our political culture is that both the left and the right see the media as biased against them. It’s easy to explain the left’s position. Media is highly consolidated in this country and controlled by very large corporations like Disney, General Electric, and News Corp. Their corporate interests bleed down into the coverage they provide. It’s harder to see how the right can ignore this basic, inarguable, fact and insist that the media is biased against them. But it comes down to social conservatism. Media corporations may be fiscally conservative but they’re also peddling promiscuity and sexual objectification. Beyond that, they’re creatures of an Establishment that has accepted the New Deal and the Great Society and women’s rights and gay rights and the moral rectitude of the Civil Rights movement. The social conservatives have fought all of those issues and have never fully embraced any of them, even in retrospect. Therefore, their worldview has never been reflected or even particularly respected in the corporate media world.
That’s why they see obviously right-wing outfits like ABC News as somehow tilted against them. They’re wrong about that, but not in the way many think. The corporate media is tilted against radical ideas from both sides, and they get to define what is radical. Canada’s health care system is radical. So is any effort to privatize Social Security. Scandanavian day care provisions are radical, but so is ripping up the Civil Rights Act protection against segregated lunch counters. The corporate media ridicules ideas that are out of the mainstream regardless of what side they come from and regardless of their intrinsic merit.
If you want to radically change the way the federal government works by, say, introducing an entirely new interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, don’t expect favorable or sympathetic coverage from the corporate media. But you face the same problem advocates of single-payer health care face. They’re biased, but they’re not biased against one side or the other so much as they’re biased against radical change. Social conservatives convince themselves that the problem is that mainstream culture has radically changed and their proposals are straightforward calls to return to what used to be uncontroversial and normal. In some cases they are correct about that, in others they have created an idyllic past that never actually existed.
However you want to look at it, there is still no justification for smearing people with misleading video editing. The instinct to condemn Breitbart is the correct one, and trying to justify his actions as mere tit-for-tat isn’t morally convincing in the least.
Interesting. This morning Juan Cole used the term, “Breitbartism,” in this article, The Israel Lobbies and Breitbartism: Dirty Tricks, Taboos and the threat to American Democracy.
It was about CAMERA, a right wing pro-Israel propaganda org, which apparently engages in Breitbartism all the time.
http://www.juancole.com/2010/0...
Why the right complains about the liberal media is clear. It is a sucker punch meant to work the refs. Why the media kowtows to the likes of FoxNews and tilts Republican (not right-wing, elite Republican) is also clear; the same elites and wanna-be elites control them. Which is why the media doesn’t respond to the left’s attacks the way it responds to those on the right.
The other issue is that the elites, media included, understand that the economic policies of the social conservatives are going to be helpful to them. And the social policies are not going to be that great an impediment. Remember Hollywood’s censorship committee and Fulton Sheen and other major religious figures with regular shows on network TV. Or the apotheosis of Billy Graham.
But their conventional wisdom is that the economic policies of liberals, progressives, and the left will be bad for their personal pocketbooks, power, and status. The pocketbooks issue is arguable because when lower income people prosper, the higher incomes prosper more in absolute terms, although inequality in incomes (relative terms) might be reduced. But democratic politics advocated by liberals, progressives, and the left in general will diminish their power in absolute terms (which is also relative terms). And their status will become more dependent on their celebrity, which is why so many of the elite have shed their anonymity and become media figures.
But rightwing power as a minority has depended on a circle-the-wagons response under all circumstances, not matter how grievous the crime. And no matter how much lying it will take to do it. That’s who they are. True disciples of the early Lee Atwater. And it works because those opposed to them have no such unity in lying; moreover because of its diversity, the left instead of circling the wagons tends to circle the firing squad.
yes, the tactical part of it is real. They’d say the media was biased even if they didn’t believe it. But they do believe it, and it’s true in a narrow, misleading sense. The media doesn’t share their aversion to the New Deal or the Great Society or the browning of America, or the sexualization of our culture, or contraception, or abortion, or women in the workplace, or what have you. The media is pushing casual, consequence-free sex to an almost ludicrous degree in nearly all their programming and movies. They also portray gays sympathetically, lionize career women, and routinely depict white father figures as ridiculous dupes. Some of the right’s complaints I agree with, but most of them I see as simple intolerance. But I do see our media as hostile to socially conservative values (both in entertainment and news coverage). The thing is, they’re just as hostile to dirty hippies and economic populism.
And they tend to bend over backwards to report what the right has to say without enough effort to judge its accuracy for the consumer. That creates a lazy bias in the right’s favor. They basically shut-out far-left voices unless they are criticizing the center-left, but there is no corresponding limitation on how far right you can be and still have your voice heard. So, there’s significant bias against the left just in terms of how much access they get to voice their opinions.
Actually, the media is liberal in an epistemological sense, not a political sense…
A comment over at Palin’s twitter page gave insight. Joe Starbuck wrote that Obama was carrying a book he was reading about the end of America that was written by a Muslim.
He got that scoop from Breithart’s website.
Now, “Joe” apparently never reads anything longer than a tweet nor sourced farther than the attack that Breithart wants to run. Nor will he ever.
The book, well it’s Fareed Zakaria’s. ’nuff said.
People who are looking for an attack will never understand ethics beyond the absurd interpretation of the ends justify the means.