The troubling message to progressives is that they remain essentially orphans when it comes to having their political interests addressed by any corporate news outlet. While the Right has built its own vast media infrastructure – reaching from newspapers, magazines and books to radio, TV and the Internet – the Left generally has treated media as a low priority.
Though some on the Left saw hope in the MSNBC evening line-up, the larger reality was that even inside the world of NBC News, the other content ranged from the pro-Establishment centrism of anchor Brian Williams to the center-right views of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to CNBC’s mix of free-market extremism and corporate boosterism.
While gratified to be given a few hours each night on MSNBC, the Left surely had nothing to compare with Murdoch’s News Corporation and its longstanding commitment to a right-wing perspective on Fox News and News Corp.'s many other print and electronic outlets.
As I wrote in an article last November, “Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a ‘patriotic’ war booster.The man ain't lying is he? Does it not all make sense now? We have a mere 14 hours a week whilst the right has tens of hours a week? If you count the scum in talk radio then it bounces the numbers even higher.
Yet, the president who was elected by the voters in 2008, not a panel of leftwing nutters, is father from the right than the left in a vast majority of issues. If you listen to the screaming nutters on the right on Faux, or Limbaugh, Palin,Savage etc he is no where near their beliefs. He wants to bring our nation to it's knees they tell us daily. He wants to kill your granny! He wants to bankrupt Amerika!
But his ratings are higher than Reagan's were at this stage in his presidency, more people trust him to fix things than trust the Republicans.
So why is it that you can not find more talking heads disseminating information with that "famous liberal bias" the right constantly screams about on tv? Why is it that MSNBC has not shown a scintilla of loyalty to the hosts on the left similar to what Faux shows to it's stable of rightwing hosts? Again from Parry's article:
“Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.
*snip*
The ongoing significance of America’s media imbalance is that it gives the Right enormous capabilities to control the national debate, not only during election campaigns but year-round. Republicans can deploy what intelligence operatives call “agit-propaganda,” stirring controversies that rile up the public and redound to the GOP’s advantage.
These techniques have proved so effective that not even gifted political speakers, whether the savvy Bill Clinton or the eloquent Barack Obama, have had any consistent success in countering the angry cacophony that the Right can orchestrate.
One week, the Right's theme is “Obamacare’s death panels”; another week, it’s “the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The Democrats are left scrambling to respond – and their responses, in turn, become fodder for critical commentary, as too wimpy or too defensive or too something.
The mainstream media and progressives often join in this criticism, wondering why Obama let himself get blind-sided or why he wasn’t tougher or why he can’t control the message. For the Right and the Republicans, it’s a win-win-win, as the right-wing base is energized, more public doubts are raised about the President, and the Left is further demoralized.All questions and no answers. It's disheartening ain't it? Don't it piss you the hell off?
Well, its a mute point now as the era of Comcast starts now....and we will see how that shit unfolds...but one thing is for certain, it will be about ratings..bet the farm on that kids..bet the farm.
So keep watching the few shows we still got on the telly. It's all we got, along with Maher of course. And hopefully KO will return, eventually, on another channel stronger and more eloquently than ever, ripping the right with everything he has.
