Left-wing is now a synonym for Bush critic; or more generally, it equals "non-movement conservative".

Hence, when (at the time) registered Republican John Cole, who was opposed to the expansion of S-Chip, criticized Michelle Malkin for stalking a 12 year old child she dismissed him as a "leftist."

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2007/10/leftists.html

In the minds of Malkin and company, there is really only one kind of American: Americans who think like them. Everyone else is "the left." When Cole is called a "leftist" what he's really being called is an infidel and/or heretic.

Bill O'Reilly, who has a history of inverting reality for the sake of his ego - http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2007/07/laundering-hate.html - two nights ago basically asserted that the entire American media other than that owned by Rupert Murdoch, Rev. Moon, Richard Mellon Scaife, etc. is Marxist/anarchist propaganda. Where normally the conservative movement opines about a "liberal media" bias, O'Reilly's paranoid mind has now invented an imaginary communist (aka "far left") media bias.

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2008/05/bill-oreilly-has-become-completely.html

All right. Be that as it may, the really interesting part of this story is the vast left-wing conspiracy in the media. Scott McClellan knows he's going to find plenty of sympathetic ears in the press. There's no doubt about it.

Since Iraq went south, a number of media vehicles have turned sharply left. We know about NBC News. And now we're seeing Newsweek magazine go crazy. Since John Meacham took over as editor, Newsweek has trashed Mother Teresa, hired the hateful founder of the Daily Kos, provided a cadre of far-left commentators to NBC, and generally lost all journalistic credibility. The result is that Newsweek's circulation is collapsing, down 11 percent in less than a year.

But — and this is important — there's no media counter for NBC News, Newsweek, The New York Times and dozens of other committed-left media. There's no right-wing media conspiracy. Conservatives generally aren't crazy about John McCain.

Funny how the media is "left-wing" when it has on someone who criticizes the administration for its deception regarding Iraq and the outing of Valerie Plame, but lunatics like O'Reilly don't seem to notice that Ann Coulter appears on the same media whenever she puts out her latest book characterizing "liberals" as Evil incarnate.

An excellent book on how the corporatization of the media has led to a press decidedly less free is News Incorporated:Corporate Media Ownership And Its Threat To Democracy. I don't see it ever plugged much, but it covers the topic very well from multiple perspectives.

http://www.amazon.com/News-Incorporated-Corporate-Ownership-Democracy/dp/1591022320

From Publishers Weekly

The last decade has seen a blossoming of Internet and cable television news sources—and, say many critics, a deterioration in the quality of reporting. The problem, according to Cohen and his left-leaning colleagues, is the ever-increasing concentration of media outlets owned by only a "handful" of massive corporations. In 1983, for example, a seasoned media insider estimated that 50 companies controlled 90% of America's news diet; by 2000, that number had plummeted to six. While Republicans and Democrats both take issue with what they consider a bias in news coverage, the core of this book's argument is that the system is too top-heavy, and that the corporations that own the news organizations wield too much control. For example, there's the case in which a Fox TV executive defends the spiking of an exposé on agricultural product provider Monsanto with the assertion that "we paid $3 billion for these stations; we'll decide what the news is." The contributors to this fine and serious-minded volume (which include MSNBC columnist Eric Alterman, Mother Jones publisher Jay Harris and former FCC chair Reed F. Hundt) exhaustively diagnose the problem of corporate-owned media from a variety of angles and, to their credit, don't hold back on addressing the obvious dilemma: what to do about it? (They suggest everything from disseminating news through Web logs to writing congresspersons to put pressure on the FCC.)