Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh Are Crazy -- Yet Corporate Media Legitimize Them

It's no coincidence that when members of the media talk about the media these days, they tend to talk about two things: the supposed importance of right-wing media like Fox News, and claims that the rest of the media lean to the left. The two concepts are fundamentally intertwined and mutually reinforcing -- and deeply flawed.

It may seem odd that much of the news media would simultaneously pronounce itself guilty of liberal bias and spend the year after a presidential election won convincingly by the more progressive candidate talking about the importance and influence of a conservative cable channel whose viewership consists of about 1 percent of the nation. But both of those somewhat inconsistent media memes can be explained by journalists' frequent inability to see where the center of the country really is. That inability makes journalists think they are further left of center than they actually are (even assuming they are at all to the left of center). And it makes them inflate the importance of right-wing operatives masquerading as media figures -- people who would have far less influence if actual reporters stopped buying their nonsense.

Their hateful views and adversarial relationship with the truth place the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the far-right fringe of a party and movement that have lost the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections and that holds only 40 percent of the seats in Congress. They are on the far-right edge of a party that is far to the right of the rest of the country.

And, it must be said, they do not tell the truth. They lie about things large and small. They lie to smear their adversaries, and they lie for no real reason at all. Their lies should disqualify them from ever being taken seriously. But instead, the media have decided that if anything they say turns out to contain a sliver of truth, everything they say must be paid immediate attention.

That's what happened when, after years of making absurd claims about ACORN -- remember the lie that ACORN was going to get billions of stimulus dollars? -- some conservative activists induced a statistically insignificant number of the organization's low-level employees to behave badly. The rest of the media rushed to cover the "scandal" -- and to beat themselves up for not having taken their cues from Beck & Co. sooner. The ombudsmen for the The Washington Post and The New York Times, for example, scolded their papers for being too slow to report on Beck-generated controversies and gave credence to conservative claims that the delay was the result of liberal bias.

What few journalists seem to understand is that once you accept someone like Glenn Beck as a legitimate media figure, it skews your view of the rest of the media. This is not a new phenomenon -- not by any means. More than two years ago, I argued that once you accept Ann Coulter, who calls John Edwards a "faggot," as a legitimate guest on shows like NBC's Today, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- who merely calls Edwards a "girl" -- seems positively reasonable. Thus the entire media discourse is shoved in the direction of its least legitimate participants.

That's how reporters -- and not just those on Rupert Murdoch's payroll -- come to see the non-Beck, non-Hannity "reporters" at Fox News as fair and balanced. The "news" division at Fox spreads falsehoods and right-wing nonsense round the clock, but many journalists have bought into the idea that while Fox's "opinion" hosts may be conservatives, the rest of the channel plays it down the middle. After all, compared to a crazy liar like Glenn Beck, Fox's "news" programs seem perfectly legitimate and impartial. But judged by any reasonable standard, they are nothing of the kind.