Politics as religion in America
There is something terrifying in this. The media have certainly been cowed; they treat intolerance as if it were legitimate political activity.
Jamison Foser at Media Matters:
Like a dog that's been beat too much
But what is stunning is that even as they run chasing after every story conservatives hype, the media apologize for not doing so more quickly. That's just what they've done the past week.
On Sunday, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander devoted his column to conservative complaints that the paper had been too slow to cover ACORN. Alexander agreed with the complaints and suggested the "tardiness" was a result of liberal bias.
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And Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli worrying "that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view."
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So whom did Alexander quote or paraphrase arguing that the media don't exhibit a liberal bias or that they have devoted too much attention to ACORN, or that -- as the new study released this month makes clear -- that they haven't bothered to fact-check the sensational right-wing claims about ACORN that they report? Nobody.
I think both these pieces are excellent. However, I'm no longer willing to give a paper like the Post the benefit of the doubt. They're sensitive to conservative criticism the way Br'er rabbit was sensitive to being thrown into the briar patch.
I've linked this before. It's just one incident that the Post quickly regretted. I think of it as an isolated incident the way a smoking gun with fingerprints on it is an isolated piece of evidence in a murder investigation.
More to come, but what do you all think? My opinion is that big corporations have bought our politicians, they've bought our media, and they are driving the country into a series of catastrophes.
UPDATE i: Language will be a problem.
What's Liberal? (Hanx, Perfesser Bérubé!)
What's Conservative? Republican, Democrat? How about the divide between editorial and news, at least as respected in name only as Church and State?
I know corporate leg-humping when I see it, and accusations of 'liberal bias' just allow the Washington Post to hump corporate leg harder.
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