What We're Up Against

You know, progressive sites often talk about the so-called liberal media, and the outsider might look at that appellation and wonder what the hell we're talking about. Many journalists self-identify as liberal, they say. The New York Times is an offshoot of the Democratic Party, it is alleged. And so on, and so forth.

I don't think people really understand how pervasive conservative framing has become in the world of the press. There are lots of examples just today on how this is done.

Take the aforementioned New York Times, which today devotes valuable front-page space, not to Iraq, or Iran, or the immigration debate, or NSA spying, but to the personal lives of two people, the marriage of the Clintons. I thought we had collectively as a population decided that we don't give a fuck about this sometime in 1998. But to read this article, you'd think every water cooler in the country was buzzing with salacious theories of how often the Clenis had sex with his wife. This is tabloid stuff on the front page of the "paper of record." It employs the classic conservative frame of distraction, filling time with meaningless, easy-to-write stories that do nothing to give the American people the information they need. (Incidentally, I'm with Atrios in wondering when that long story about all the Republican Presidential candidates and their marriages are given the same media attention).

Of course, large swaths of the "liberal media" are explicitly conservative outlets, like Fox News, whose latest topic of discussion featured the headline "Al Gore's Global Warming Movie: Could It Destroy Our Economy?" As if merely bringing up the "inconvenient truth" (to coin a phrase) that all the melting glaciers and violent weather-related disasters of the past decade might have something to do with fossil fuel consumption will start a run on the banks. This is typical corporate conservative rhetoric, dressed up as a "question" on the fair and balanced news network. I also posted yesterday about a couple outright lies from one of the leading lights of the conservative media.

And in the supposedly "independent" media, conservative frames abound. Like that one about Democrats hating the troops, an example of which is caught by Peter Daou:

ABC's 'The Note' Suggests Democrats Want US Troops Killed and Maimed

How else to interpret this:

"As is always the case with the out-of-power party, Democrats have to root root root for bad news. And no bad news source is better for the Democrats' election prospects than the bad news from Iraq."

This is what we're up against. I don't think the media is necessarily liberal or conservative. I do think they're lazy, and as such have been easy to take ready-made conservative media narratives and frames and incorporate them into their stories. These are hard habits to break when it's so easy to write the same "everybody's corrupt" or "Democrats are anti-military" story over and over again. Plus, the influence of corporate conglomeration on the media landscape cannot be minimized.

The indepdendent media, led by the Internet, will continue to hold these slanders and lies to account. But it's important to step back and understand the "why" before simply hacking away at the "what."