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Creating a comprehensive list of The Conservative Media. Lawmakers
Urge Bush to Protect U.S. Planes. Sen. Bob Graham, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said such a move needed to come from the administration immediately, without requiring further action by the U.S. Congress. "I think that should be something initiated immediately by the newly established Transportation Security Agency within the Department of Transportation to respond to this or any other form of attack against commercial aviation or other forms of transportation in the United States," Graham told the "Fox News Sunday" program. Graham was joined on the program by Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the panel, and said U.S. intelligence agencies now were predicting a 75 percent chance or better of attacks inside the United States in the event of any attack on Iraq that threatens Saddam Hussein.>>More GOP
Ready To Flex Conservative Agenda DANA POINT, Calif. -- Rudy Giuliani stood at the podium and looked out at the gathering of Republican bigwigs from all over America. "Sitting around this room reminds me of the scene in `The Godfather' where they all came around a table to make peace," the former New York mayor and federal prosecutor said, "except Republicans have expanded to include women as members of the family." Whether meant that way or not, Giuliani's observation reinforced for critics what's wrong with the GOP today, despite its success in the elections. In this gathering of both current and incoming Republican governors, officials and consultants, there were hardly any blacks, Hispanics or Asian Americans. There were no governors who could be tagged as liberal, and only a handful of moderates. It's a conservative party, "in a conservative country," says former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore. But it's a party that knows that to keep winning majorities, it needs to broaden its base. The challenge to this party's strength and its potential is clearly within its own ranks. With Republicans now controlling Congress and the White House for the first time since the early 1950s, conservatives are eager to see their agenda enacted, an agenda that includes the kind of divisive issues that could send swing voters scurrying to the Democratic side. They see an agenda in January that includes partial-birth abortion, faith-based initiatives and other matters that were too incendiary to touch during the election season and too much of a long shot to bring up when Democrats controlled the Senate. Calling attention to such issues may not be politically lethal if done gently and in a non-threatening way, said Arthur Miller, director of the Iowa Social Science Institute. >>More GADFLYONLINE As the publisher and founder of Adbusters Media Foundation (and its magazine), Kalle Lasn is at the forefront of media skeptics. A gadfly in his own right, he also created Culture Jammers (WWW.CULTUREJAMMERS.ORG), an organization that sees itself as "one of the most significant social movements of the next twenty years. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major rethinking of the way we will live in the 21st century... It will alter the way we live and think. It will change the way information flows, the way institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way we interact with the mass media and the way in which meaning is produced in our society." >>More Right
Wing Gets Gored Not since Hillary Clinton has a prominent Democrat so publicly ripped the conservatives for making people with D after their names look bad. (Although in Hillary's case, what the VRWC was charging – that her husband was carrying on with the intern – turned out to be true.) Unlike the former first lady, Gore specifically indicts elements of the media for carrying the right's political water. And he names names – unlike most pols who want to avoid ticking off those who buy ink by the barrel. So you could depict this as a profile in courage. Or a profile in self-destructiveness. What, after all, does the ex-veep gain by denouncing the likes of Fox News and the Washington Times? Let's say Gore is right, that conservative news outlets are trying to blacken the reputations of people like him. Doesn't complaining about it just sound like whining? Or is he playing to his base, the way conservatives have done all these years by moaning about the liberal media? After all, if you're going to take on Saddam and Osama, you'd better be able to deal with the likes of the Washington Times. The conservative media aren't going anywhere. Deal with it. "But Mr. Gore has a bone to pick with his critics: namely, he says, that a systematically orchestrated bias in the media makes it impossible for him and his fellow Democrats to get a fair shake. >>More In Media Res By Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 29, 2002 This week Al Gore said the obvious. "The media is kind of weird these days on politics," he told The New York Observer, "and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party." The reaction from most journalists in the "liberal media" was embarrassed silence. I don't quite understand why, but there are some things that you're not supposed to say, precisely because they're so clearly true. The political agenda of Fox News, to take the most important example, is hardly obscure. Roger Ailes, the network's chairman, has been advising the Bush administration. Fox's Brit Hume even claimed credit for the midterm election. "It was because of our coverage that it happened," he told Don Imus. "People watch us and take their electoral cues from us. No one should doubt the influence of Fox News in these matters." (This remark may have been tongue in cheek, but imagine the reaction if the Democrats had won and Dan Rather, even jokingly, had later claimed credit.) >> More (Registration Required) Media fairness questioned in wake of midterm elections By Jeff Dufour, TheHill.com , November 20, 2002 ...Appearing on C-SPAN Friday, Jack White, a former Time magazine columnist and now writer in residence at Howard University, pronounced liberal bias dead. Said White: “Sooner or later I think we’re all going to have to acknowledge that the myth of liberal bias in the press is just that, it’s a myth. May have been true at one time, but it’s been beaten out of them, and I don’t think that they conform to that anymore.” Then singling out a popular target for liberals, he added, “Fox News is about as [blatantly] biased as you possibly could get.” Time reporter Josh Tyrangiel took it a step further, suggesting in the Nov. 18 issue that conservatives now primarily control the media and influence elections. He wrote: “Even if Democrats pull together on some big issues, they’ll still have to overcome GOP bully pulpits in the White House and Congress — and a new reality: conservative bias in the media.” Al Hunt, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has written that the current press corps is “the most acquiescent since pre-Watergate; those liberal media conspiracy theorists never contrast the coverage of the Bush and Clinton White Houses.” >>More FAIR: Who's On The Media? FAIR.org, June 2002 A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican. Conducted for FAIR by the media analysis firm Media Tenor, the study shows that the big three nightly news shows rely heavily on society's most powerful groups when they report the news of the day. More than one in four sources were politicians-- George W. Bush alone made up 9 percent of all sources-- versus a mere 3 percent for all non-governmental advocacy groups, the sources most likely to present an alternative view to the government's. Even before the September 11 attacks, Republicans made up a full 68 percent of partisan sources (which surged to 87 percent after the attacks). These figures should dispel the myth of a liberal or pro-Democrat news bias, but don't necessarily prove a conservative or Republican slant. Rather, they reflect a strong tendency of the networks to turn to the party in power for information. Sixty-two percent of all partisan sources were administration officials; when these are set aside, the remaining partisan sources were 51 percent Republican and 48 percent Democrat, suggesting a strong advantage overall for the party that holds the White House. >>More Media-Homeless Liberals Consortium News, November 13, 2002 The secret to the conservative media’s success in reshaping America’s political landscape is not the pervasive nastiness, though that’s played a role. The key is that conservatives have created a “media home” for tens of millions of like-minded viewers, listeners and readers across the country. Conservatives anywhere can tune in Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or a host of other broadcast outlets. They can open the pages of the Wall Street Journal editorial section, the Link 20, the Weekly Standard or dozens of other print or Internet publications. There, they will find their interests addressed, their outlook validated, their enemies unmasked. >>More Think Hard Jeff Koopersmith, American Politics Journal, November 6, 2002 If you yet doubt that Roger Ailes is a political genius, think again. Like Goebbels before him, the chief of FOX News has succeeded this day in not only changing the way an entire nation -- in this case America, not Germany -- looks at elective politics, but the way other networks treat the political and policy news about the most powerful economic and military nation in history. Think about it -- and think hard. A near-moronic "President", handled by the nation's worst and almost criminal minds, has led members of his party to victory against at least more fair-minded, far smarter, highly educated opponents. How? By lying to the American people -- and nearly bankrupting them by allowing and continuing to allow rampant corporate thievery. By teasing them with meaningless tax cuts that wouldn't even pay a cable television bill. By attempting to undo 200 years of jurisprudence and constitutional scholarship. >> More Mainstream Journalism: Shredding the First Amendment By Jon Prestage, Online Journal, November 7, 2002 The national broadcast and print news media's inability to critically assess George W. Bush's foreign and domestic policies and to serve as a watchdog for the public's interest is nothing less than a threat to the country's democratic processes. Not only has the national news media been unable to piece together a cogent and balanced review of Bush's policies, it has helped the administration to shape and spin national debate and muddy the waters to cover its actual intentions. >> More The US "free" press and the Pentagon war machine By Bill Vann, WSWS, 14 November 2002 In the rash of articles that spread across the front pages of virtually every major newspaper earlier this week detailing US plans for the invasion of Iraq, information was attributed to unnamed “military sources,” “senior administration officials” or “Pentagon analysts.” An article appearing in the November 10 Washington Post, however, went further, providing its readers with a fleeting insight into the real relations that exist between the supposedly independent media and Washington’s war machine. “This article was discussed extensively in recent days with several senior civilian and military Defense Department officials,” the Post reported. “At their request, several aspects of the plan are being withheld from publication. Those aspects include the timing of certain military actions, the trigger points for other moves, some of the tactics being contemplated and the units that would execute some of the tactics.” >>More The Most Biased Name in News: Fox News Channel's extraordinary right-wing tilt By Seth Ackerman, Fair.org, August, 2001 Years ago, Republican party chair Rich Bond explained that conservatives' frequent denunciations of "liberal bias" in the media were part of "a strategy" (Washington Post, 8/20/92). Comparing journalists to referees in a sports match, Bond explained: "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time." But when Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour cable network, debuted in 1996, a curious thing happened: Instead of denouncing it, conservative politicians and activists lavished praise on the network. "If it hadn't been for Fox, I don't know what I'd have done for the news," Trent Lott gushed after the Florida election recount (Washington Post, 2/5/01). George W. Bush extolled Fox News Channel anchor Tony Snow--a former speechwriter for Bush's father--and his "impressive transition to journalism" in a specially taped April 2001 tribute to Snow's Sunday-morning show on its five-year anniversary (Washington Post, 5/7/01). The right-wing Heritage Foundation had to warn its staffers not to watch so much Fox News on their computers, because it was causing the think tank's system to crash. When it comes to Fox News Channel, conservatives don't feel the need to "work the ref." The ref is already on their side. Since its 1996 launch, Fox has become a central hub of the conservative movement's well-oiled media machine. Together with the GOP organization and its satellite think tanks and advocacy groups, this network of fiercely partisan outlets--such as the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative talk-radio shows like Rush Limbaugh's--forms a highly effective right-wing echo chamber where GOP-friendly news stories can be promoted, repeated and amplified. Fox knows how to play this game better than anyone. Yet, at the same time, the network bristles at the slightest suggestion of a conservative tilt. In fact, wrapping itself in slogans like "Fair and balanced" and "We report, you decide," Fox argues precisely the opposite: Far from being a biased network, Fox argues, it is the only unbiased network. So far, Fox's strategy of aggressive denial has worked surprisingly well; faced with its unblinking refusal to admit any conservative tilt at all, some commentators have simply acquiesced to the network's own self-assessment. FAIR has decided to take a closer look. >>More The End of Fairness By EDWARD MONKS For The Register-Guard, June 30, 2002 Once upon a Time, in a country that now seems far away, radio and television broadcasters had an obligation to operate in the public interest. That generally accepted principle was reflected in a rule known as the Fairness Doctrine. The rule, formally adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949, required all broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to the discussion of controversial matters of public interest. It further required broadcasters to air contrasting points of view regarding those matters. The Fairness Doctrine arose from the idea imbedded in the First Amendment that the wide dissemination of information from diverse and even antagonistic sources is essential to the public welfare and to a healthy democracy. The FCC is mandated by federal law to grant broadcasting licenses in such a way that the airwaves are used in the "public convenience, interest or necessity." The U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine, expressing the view that the airwaves were a "public trust" and that "fairness" required that the public trust accurately reflect opposing views. >>More |
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