Our So-Called Liberal Media

Sarah Palin is about to get another prime time hagiography, this time from ABC's right wing lapdog Charles Gibson. A made-for-TV moment will have Palin's son ship off to Iraq on September 11 while the rest of the family cries for the cameras. MSNBC has fired Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews from coverage of Election 2008 after the Republican Party and its protofascist operatives complained. All this while Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and the Entire Fox network still have jobs. The rest of the corporate media has latched onto any national poll showing a tight presidential race, no matter how bad the poll's methodology or how irrelevant national polls are. In an era where even Karl Rove's own electoral map polls show McCain going down to a sizeable defeat, they expect us to believe that the race is a dead heat.

After 8 years of Republican incompetence, graft, and downright malicious governance, Barack Obama is in a position to win an electoral landslide of Reaganesque proportions (thanks to JoeP and Matt for that term). But the MSM doesn't make money by practicing good (or fair) journalism, covering stories accurately, or standing up to right wing bullies. Instead, the MSM makes money by selling ad space to some of the very corporations that have benefited most from Republican policies. And much of the MSM is in fact owned by the military-industrial complex. Westinghouse owns CBS...GE owns NBC. Disney owns ABC. And Rupert Murdoch owns Faux News and the Wall Street Journal. And even in the newsroom, you dance with the one what brung ya.

So please, shut the fuck up about the media. It's only as liberal as the conservative businesses that own it.

Chronicle Bans the Word "Progressive"

Bruce Brugmann, editor and founder of the SF Bay Guardian, has the scoop: Hearst Corporation has banned the use of the term "progressive" to describe local political figures, favoring instead derrogatory terms like "far left" and "ultra-liberal." This is typical of the Chron's heavily-biased coverage in the local market. The company that brought us "Remember the Maine!" has been waging an editorial and yellow journalism campaign against San Francisco's progressive Board of Supervisors for almost 8 years...ever since the return of district elections, and the subsequent victory of neighborhood interests over the corrupt political machine of Willie Brown.

See, The Chronicle doesn't write stories for the people of San Francisco. They write stories to please their advertisers, and secondarily to soothe the egos of the wealthy suburbanites they're targeting with those ads. They also write editorials and local "coverage" designed to please their patrons in San Francisco, namely the real estate speculators, high-end retailers, PG&E, and other local forces for evil. They do this by carrying water for the likes of Gavin Newsom. Their sustained, multi-year campaign to smear progressives has largely fallen on deaf ears in San Francisco, as voters keep putting progressive politicians in office, and passing progressive initiatives.

The Chron's plummeting circulation numbers show the results of their approach. As much as I'd love to see the paper implode, I think it's important to have a true daily paper here. But we need a fair daily paper...not one that's out to denigrate anyone it disagrees with.