The Media Wants Liberals To Shut Up And Take It. Don't.

The Media Isn't Liberal And Has Never Been

NY Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger Doesn’t Want To Hear It. Too Bad.

The right has been engaged in sixty-plus year campaign to criticize and bully the mainstream media and it has been extraordinarily effective. In fact, it has been one of the conservative movement’s most successful efforts.

The foolish notion that the profit-driven sensationalist corporate media is nonetheless a member in good standing of the organized left is something that has permeated the brains not just of political activists, but the public at large. “The liberal media” mythology is gospel truth to far too many Americans.

The effect this campaign has had on the press is very clear in the material they produce. Premises are more often than not couched in the concerns of the right. The press assumes conservative ideas are popular and liberal ideas are not (the opposite is true). The press insists on balancing conservative malfeasance and open criminality with minor, sometimes completely imagined, offenses of the left. The press almost always asks about class warfare on the behalf of the uber wealthy while barely hiding their disgust at the existence of the poor and middle class (far too many journalists come from the upper echelons of American society).

Writers and editors and broadcasters and the like know that if they stray beyond the acceptable parameters set out by the right in their publications and broadcasts, that they will receive a torrent of criticism. This comes in the form of reports from organizations like Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center (aka Newsbusters), commentary on Fox News, and from mobs whipped up by right-wing radio and conservative blogs. Often for these journalists it isn’t worth the hassle to tell an outright truth about the right, so their stories become infected with “both sides” journalism or become endless profiles of people reflecting the conservative mindset while the rest are ignored and marginalized.

The press has far too often been given a pass on this by the left. Media criticism from the left is not nearly as organized as its right-wing counterpart. To be sure there are organizations like Media Matters for America (where I worked for over a decade) and Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and beyond, but those groups do not exercise the same type of on-the-ground influence over the left as the right does with its flock.

But when there is some (faint) noise of criticism from the left, the response from the mainstream press strikes a far different tone. They bow before the right and are simply outraged that the left could possibly question its work.

Instead of taking left-leaning criticism into consideration, the mainstream press adopts a condescending tone, operating as if liberals simply just don’t understand how media works. The press also loves to say that what liberals desire is a Fox News-style propaganda operation promoting the virtue of the Democratic Party and the left. Which is a bullshit, bad-faith stance.

Check out this comment from NY Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger for an example of this dismissive tone:

For example, in my country, there are a disproportionate number of conservative voters who will not trust any news source that says that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, and we can’t try to win those folks over and hedge our language. We are just stating the truth fully and plainly, but we are also doing that in a way that is unemotional. We are not anyone’s opposition and we’re not anyone’s lap dog.

We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden. He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.

In no universe is Trump’s authoritarian and fake claim that he won the 2020 election anywhere on par with legitimate concerns about Biden’s age. The only way you could make those two world views two sides of the same coin would be if liberals insisted that Biden is only 50 years old despite the clear evidence to the contrary.

But the Sulzbergers of the world are letting liberals know that they should just shut up and take it. We also saw this over and over again from Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, who responded to legitimate criticisms of her hagiographic coverage of Trump with the bad faith claim that liberals just wanted her to say mean things about Trump, and that Hillary Clinton was solely to blame for her loss (never mind the Times front page working as a Trump Super PAC).

This should be a bat signal-style sign to liberals to pour on the pressure, don’t relent. Thus far liberal media criticism largely reflects what I have described as a Pollyanna world view that is all too pervasive on the left. This absolutely naïve notion that the mainstream press shares our values and our worries about Trump and the radical right, but that the media just keeps making honest mistakes in their coverage.

Balderdash. They know exactly what they are doing. They like it. They love it.

Trump in the White House means daily bigot and fool eruptions that fit easily into web headlines and 20-second news blips. Where Biden (and Obama before him) is boring and engaged in policy affecting billions of people around the world, Trump did things like getting into feuds with Omarosa, talking about tree cities, and calling into television shows like some sort of sports talk junkie.

They love it. They get book deals to talk about Trump dysfunction (ABC News’ Jonathan Karl has written three Trump books for Christ’s sake). They get ratings. Internet traffic. And on and on. The press misses Trump dearly and liberals are harshing their mellow by politely criticizing their work.

Too bad.

If anything, liberal media criticism should significantly increase. The stakes are too high. Republicans were empowered to do things like invade Iraq, kill Roe, push Muslim bans and nearly repeal health care because the press has bent both knees before them.

I don’t believe that the media (which I am a part of) is the “enemy of the people” as Trump said, but they aren’t allies either. They’re a special interest group with enormous influence and they need to be named and shamed when they poison the commons.

Take their mewling complaints as a compliment. You’re having success. We have let them get away with far too much for way too long. It is past time to rebel against them, nonviolently confronting them with their misreporting and “both sides” equivocations. Enough is enough.

The mainstream media doesn’t want to hear liberals speak up. Too bad. Get louder.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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