The Time Has Come to Create a Real 'Liberal Media'

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted November 21, 2008.

So, it was not so much that the Left lost the “war of ideas” to the Right over the past three decades; it was more that the Left abandoned the battlefield.

The Left’s neglect of media proved disastrous. The Right, with its three-decade project of building media and controlling the federal government, showed it could create far more poor people than well-meaning progressives could feed – and put more wetlands at risk than could ever be bought up.

Another result of the Left’s media miscalculation has been that even when moderately progressive politicians have managed to claw their way to power – as Bill Clinton did in 1993 and the congressional Democrats did in 2007 – they must operate within a hostile environment, fighting relentless media assaults and often scaling back plans.

It has been no accident that the last three decades have been dominated by three Republican presidents who have held the White House for a combined 20 years. At each step, the media played a pivotal role, most notably in promoting the incompetent George W. Bush over the well-qualified Al Gore.

Only in the last few years has there been a modest pushback from the Left. Adding to a few earlier media standbys – such as Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” radio/TV program and some liberal magazines – there were these new developments:

--Often operating on a shoestring, Internet sites rose up to challenge both Bush and the fawning coverage he was getting from the major news media.

--In 2004, a poorly funded Air America took flight with the goal of putting at least a few liberal voices on AM talk radio.

--Progressives got an unexpected boost with Comedy Central’s surprise hit, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and a spin-off, “The Colbert Report” with Stephen Colbert.

--MSNBC, after trying for years to out-fox Fox News with flag-waving jingoism, took a different tack when it elevated former sportscaster Keith Olbermann to a prime-time broadcast called “Countdown,” which made a point of mocking Bill O’Reilly and other right-wing blowhards on Fox.

--When profit-obsessed MSNBC executives realized that Olbermann was boosting their ratings, they hired Air America host Rachel Maddow to put on a show that follows “Countdown,” creating a four-hour block of relatively progressive news content.

The Obama Movement

Though still operating at a fraction of the budgets available to right-wing media, this combination – grassroots Internet sites, a struggling radio network and a few toeholds inside corporate media – helped create a climate that permitted the growth of Barack Obama’s political movement and his election on Nov. 4.

But this new media ecology is very fragile.

There is also the reality that a generation of mainstream journalists has learned the lesson that tilting stories rightward protects your precious career. They have seen what happens even to media icons, like CBS News anchor Dan Rather, when the Right’s ire is stirred.

So what must be done now?

If America’s media imbalance is to be corrected, progressives – both individuals and liberal foundations – must invest heavily in a media infrastructure that is national but focused on the news centers of Washington and New York.

See more stories tagged with: media, air america, progressive movement

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

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