Oh well, I guess in order to attempt some sort of real-time interaction I guess I'm just going to keep leaving run-on sentences or fragments.

I don't recall ever hearing the emic / etic distinction, but then, I've forgotten many things I've studied.

You know, it occurs to me that mainstream news analysts feel free to look upon blog writers and commenters as some sort of indigenous population crying out for their high level anthropological analysis. Why is it we do what we do? Why are we so mad and so crazy? Why do we have such strange and primitive beliefs about the behaviors of our informational priesthood?

But anthropological (etc) analysis is not only for the weak or the poor or the 'out' groups: it's also for the powerful, for the wealthiest, for the 'in' groups.

When you have nearly the entire news media convinced that it's crucial to the fate of the USA to control who governs the tiny nation of Nicaragua, even if the insiders are bitterly arguing over just how to do that, or if one approach is slightly too bloody, we little people are allowed to notice that.

Just because the priests assure us that their bitter disagreements show them to be 'objective', it doesn't mean that we little folk fail to observe that the entire informational priesthood happens to agree that the tiny little nation of Nicaragua shouldn't be allowed to choose its own government without US intervention of some sort.

If news media collapses, 'failures' and errors tend overwhelmingly to the hawkish side, especially regarding foreign policy, then without counter-examples it doesn't directly matter which is the party in power. Explanations which depend on the party in power would apparently predict huge swings in coverage for the subjects discussed here.

Where are the foreign policy examples where either party is in power but the news media fell down on the job by favoring a dovish policy?

I don't disagree that party dominance does affect coverage, but I don't recall any hint of a time period in which in any systematic way the media made any huge errors or failures or collapses in coverage in a liberal direction.

Regardless of the past few decades's worth of screaming by the right wing, terms like "Democrat" or "Clinton" are not substitutes for saying a 'liberal' policy. Clinton backed NAFTA, and so did all the major media, and NAFTA was a Republican / Big Business policy all the way, both in terms of where the policy was generated and in substantive terms. The fact that the news media completely and utterly fell down on the job in reporting this debate from 1993, in the early days of Clinton's Presidency, is a pretty good test.

Democrats are more than able to pursue hawkish policies, particularly in foreign policy where the US is nearly unlimited in how hawkish it may be. Whatever the degree of debate in U.S. domestic policy, you're apparently not allowed to carpet bomb the red states, nor are you able to hire covert operatives to overthrow a governor you don't like, imprison him, and impose a new dictatorship more to your liking.

The major news media chatted a lot about JFK's presumably beneficial "Alliance For Progress" programs for Latin America (yes I've read through the archived coverage of newspapers and newsweeklies, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful for people who think there was a golden yesteryear of news coverage), yet they didn't investigate (a) how harmful the strings tied to that economic 'aid' was for Latin America (for example destroying native production in favor of US-subsidized imports), nor (b) how those policies went hand-in-hand with the US' building up of dictatorial national police state forces throughout the entire continent. Hardly an example of news media failing in a liberal direction, unless by definition anything JFK did was 'liberal'. Such coverage was entirely left to the 'alternative' press outside the major U.S. media.

Note also that from the point of view of the 3rd world society being bombed or overthrown, they're rather unlikely to care as we try to convince them that it really matters that the people ordering them attacked & killed are Republicans or Democrats. Supporting IMF/WB policies which strangle the domestic economy of many Latin American nations in favor of US and Western investors is hardly going to seem 'dovish' or 'liberal' to the unlucky recipients of such policies -- thankfully that IMF/WB creditors' cartel is now broken thanks to Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who either refused to abide the disastrous economic programs of the IMF/WB (Kirchner) or who provided alternate funding with almost zero policy ties (Chavez).

Yet again, I don't feel like I can recall any of these examples where there were systematic failures of news media coverage which favored dovish or liberal foreign policies.

See, the problem people like you Glenn have with the major news producers is that you think you have the moral right to hold them accountable for what they actually print, publish, or broadcast.

Whereas true news corporation professionals would tell you that they should only be judged by what's in their hearts and in their potential future intentions.

Sure, they may have broadcast & publish articles implying that there was a strongly supported connection between Iraq & the US anthrax attacks, but obviously they intended for careful readers, listeners, and viewers to cross check against other source statements and come to the conclusion that ABC was in fact not alleging the Iraq-anthrax connection that they had earlier been seeming to report.

So really what you should do, Glenn, and call them first to ask them if they intended to clear this question up at some possible point in the future, and if they had consciously intended to confuse anyone.

The news producers are simply not responsible for the quality of their actual product; it's we consumers who fail at our task of carefully comparing news products with the entire globe of alternative data available.