I hope this kind of thing finally drives the stake through the "liberal media" lie (not likely).

What Glenn exposes very nicely is what I believe is the best argument against the liberal media lie. Conservatives always argue that the reporters are liberals themselves, therefore you have a liberal media. That is false for a couple of reasons.

First, its simply not true. Most of the time this claim is backed -- if it is backed at all -- with a single, old, and seriously flawed study that actually found that reporters were slightly liberal on "social" issues but center-right on economic issues.

Second, and most importantly, even if it were true it vastly oversimplifies matters primarily by ignoring the fact that reporters are employees, not bosses. The SCLM is OWNED by fucking Republicans. Rich Republicans are not passive slackers who let their employees run the corporations they own in a way contrary to their interests. Not only that, reporters have to report to editors who are controlled by owners.

I see this every day in my own job. I work in politics and I am much more liberal than my boss. But he's the boss. We produce a lot of written analysis and we have what is analogous to an editor-reporter relationship. I write something, just like a reporter, and he either signs off on it or makes changes, just like an editor.

The reason I have my job is because I have learned to write things the way he would write them. He doesn't have to tell me in each instance how to write something. He also never had to sit down and give me explicit general rules about what he wants. He never had to say, "Make it less liberal." I picked it up over time as he made specific changes to specific documents.

In the firm I work in, I woudl venture to say that all the analysts are more liberal than the boss. But guess what? It doesn't matter.