Progressive Media Suffer Losses In the Fight Against the Right-Wing Media Machine

There have been rays of hope for progressives recently, notably in the Wisconsin uprising against Governor Walker's union-busting jihad and in Glenn Beck's impending departure from Fox News, after strong critical campaigns by Color Of Change, the Jewish Fund for Justice and others, focusing on Beck's racism and obsession with Nazism.

But let's face it: progressives are perpetually put on the defensive by the right-wing media, and so are Obama and the Democrats, for that matter. The relentless conservative propaganda machine dominates the public discourse more than ever.  The alarming result is that, according to a number of polls, the constant repetition of conservative disinformation results in many Americans increasingly denying reality.

We have reached this point over a 30- to 40-year process in which conservatives built and funded an infrastructure that is now so well entrenched it operates seamlessly. We are being overrun by a relentless, orchestrated, coordinated machine that hammers away with propaganda and obvious lies, shaped by conservative values and pro-business and corporate talking points. These are woven into conservative narratives delivered by big personalities in every corner of the media where they dominate the discourse and have the largest and most active audiences. It is, in a word, a juggernaut.

So it's particularly troubling that a bunch of bold-face progressive voices and talents, the most prominent being Keith Olbermann, have left their media perches for far less visible, and in some cases unknown, futures. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post has married AOL in a $315 million deal, and its editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, has gone out of her way to say that HuffPo hasn't been a "left" publication for more than three years, and actually, of all that huge traffic to the site, only 15-20 percent has been to the political content. Tell that to all those progressive bloggers who thought they were sitting atop the Mount Rushmore of political visibility.

Right-Wing Propaganda Breeds Denial

There is no escaping the impact of conservative media in increasing the level of denial among Americans. Take climate change and Obama's country of birth, for just two obvious examples. As the Huffington Post reports, "according to a new survey, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is connected to human-caused pollution ... is at its lowest point in three years. Only 57 percent of Americans now believe this inconvenient truth -- down from 77 percent in 2006, when Al Gore's film was released. Maybe this disturbing trend is due to climate lobbyists and certain conservative politicians and pundits going all out for years now, trying to persuade the public that the growing mountain of scientific evidence supporting global warming is FAKE."

On the question of Obama's birth, the results of a Public Policy Polling survey on the attitudes of likely Republican primary voters are extraordinary. Fifty-one percent of likely 2012 primary voters said they believe President Obama was not born in the U.S. Birthers make up a majority of those voters who say they’re likely to participate in a Republican primary next year. The GOP birther majority is a new development. The last time PPP tested this question nationally, in August of 2009, only 44 percent of Republicans said they thought Obama was born outside the country while 36 percent said that he definitely was born in the United States. If anything, birtherism is on the rise.

The right-wing propaganda machine's constant pummeling of public workers is also taking a toll on public opinion. In California, for example, a new Field Poll "shows that two-fifths of voters feel the pension benefits of state and local government workers, are too generous. About a third of respondents feel the benefits are just about right, and roughly one in 10 say they're not generous enough. Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo says that's a big change from a similar poll taken in 2009. Back then, two-fifths of voters found the pension benefits acceptable."