VOICE OF THE MAJORITY

Another liberal column. Right?
George McClure
Fort Collins
DenverPost.com
The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. I was informed of this fact by Rush Limbaugh. And Thomas Sowell. And Ann Coulter. And Rich Lowry. And Bill O'Reilly. And William Safire. And Robert Novak. And William F. Buckley, Jr. And George Will. And John Gibson. And Michelle Malkin. And David Brooks. And Tony Snow. And Tony Blankely. And Fred Barnes. And Britt Hume. And Larry Kudlow. And Sean Hannity. And David Horowitz. And William Kristol. And Hugh Hewitt. And Oliver North. And Joe Scarborough. And Pat Buchanan. And John McLaughlin. And Cal Thomas. And Joe Klein. And James Kilpatrick. And Tucker Carlson. And Deroy Murdock. And Michael Savage. And Charles Krauthammer. And Stephen Moore. And Alan Keyes. And Gary Bauer. And Mort Kondracke. And Andrew Sullivan. And Nicholas von Hoffman. And Neil Cavuto. And Matt Drudge. And Mike Rosen. And Dave Kopel. And John Caldara. The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. For instance, did you know there is an ultra-leftist professor at the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill who wrote an essay three years ago in which he called victims of Sept. 11 "little Eichmanns"? Bet you never heard of him, as the liberal media elite likes to put the kibosh on embarrassing stories like this. The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. Look at how they all gave Bill Clinton a pass on the whole Monica Lewsinsky affair. Remember? It was never in the news. We never heard any of the salacious details. The work of his presidency never came to a virtual halt while he defended himself. The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. They have so poisoned the electorate that no Republicans can get elected. Republicans don't control the presidency. Republicans don't control both houses of Congress. Republicans don't control 28 of 50 governorships. Last year, a lot was made of a report released by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The report found that 34 percent of national journalists identified themselves as liberal, 54 percent identified themselves as moderate and 7 percent identified themselves as conservative. Twenty-three percent of local journalists identified themselves as liberal, 61 percent identified themselves as moderate and 12 percent identified themselves as conservative. These figures can be interpreted in a number of ways. First of all, if you actually read the whole report, you'd come across commentary that specifically warned against drawing any easy, across-the-board conclusions: "We would be reluctant to infer too much here. The survey includes just four questions probing journalists' political attitudes, yet the answers to these questions suggest journalists have in mind something other than a classic big government liberalism and something more along the lines of libertarianism." But pretend you're doing a story on the Pew report, and the nuanced comments above are not sufficiently dramatic for your medium. You need to reduce things into some digestible sound bites. If you wanted to sound the alarm bells on the right, you could say that national journalists were nearly five times as likely to identify themselves as liberal than as conservative. This would be literally true but perhaps a little misleading, as the same poll results tell us that 61 percent of national journalists identified themselves as moderate or conservative. If you're John Gibson of Fox News, you just make up your own statistics and claim that "80-some percent of reporters are self-described liberals." If you're Rush Limbaugh, you offer up the same lie a day later and specifically cite the poll that proves you wrong: "most of them (journalists) are liberals. Eighty percent of them will admit it in the latest press poll ... ." Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that the media in America really are predominantly recalcitrant leftists. Say you're a conservative media mogul named Rupert and you have the wherewithal to do something about it. Here are three paths you might take: 1. You could announce your belief that the reporting of news is always subjective and therefore biased, so you are going to start a news network that comes at things from your own perspective in order to balance out what you perceive to be the bias of the left. 2. You could set up your own news network that actually is fair and balanced. 3. You could set up your own news network that's consistently and demonstrably partisan, but call yourself fair and balanced. Guess which one he chose. This just in at Fox News ... the mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals.

George McClure is a former stand-up comic who now works as general manager of a Denver marketing firm

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Tuesday, July 05, 2005