The media's Glenn Beck problem - Democratic Underground

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The media's Glenn Beck problem

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200910160050

The media's Glenn Beck problem
Jamison Foser
October 16, 2009 10:26 pm ET

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.

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And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the "conservative media" consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the "mainstream press" is considered "liberal" even as it "leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right."

That's some range, isn't it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation.

That's the real problem with Glenn Beck and Fox News. It isn't that they misinform the 1 percent of Americans who watch their nonsense (the vast majority of whom already agree with them). It's that the rest of the media run to the right in response to Fox -- even while becoming more and more convinced that they are guilty of liberal bias.