The Liberal Media (tm) is wimpy BECAUSE it's liberal.

All the buzz about McClellan can only be a good thing, as he is bound to make many media appearances, and try as they might to steer the conversation around to the high-schoolish, gossipy aspects of his narrative, the media's credulity and complicity can't help but come up.

Especially after the threats from "loyal Bushies" start fallen like rain on McClellan' shiny pate; he'll have to steer the discussion back to the media.

Pass the popcorn, as they say at FDL.

If the media bias in America is the result of its owners, then perhaps the answer is public-owned media, such as the CBC in Canada or the BBC in the UK. Of course, you need mechanisms to ensure that it doesn't just become a mouthpiece for the government, but it does seem to be a viable alternative to the commercial press in some countries.

Just a thought..

If the news producers refuse to respect any amount of empirical review of their actual news products, perhaps given their worship of powerful insiders, we will get another moment of painful, false, and temporary self-reflection given this revealing account by a Bush Jr. administration insider.

More than likely, I expect a 'been there, done that' wherein various powerful news producers will point out that they have already admitted in various columns that they didn't quite do all they should have with regard to the giant propaganda buildup to the Iraq invasion & occupation, and no, nothing else, because everything else they did and do just fine on.

"Liberal" is neither a compliment nor a neutral descriptive term, and Bush criticism by the likes of Keith Olbermann may have precious little to do with liberalism. My conservative parents both recognize Bush's crowd as the inept and corrupt opportunists they are, yet nobody ever confuses them with "liberals". It's interesting how the epithet is used to tar critics, and thus cow the press into submission. Maybe that alleviates us from the burden of having to understand liberalism.

I've always felt the whole point of the term "liberal media" is to stifle any criticism of the rightwing's lock grip on the mainstream network and print media. If anyone in the media speaks out against rightwing corruption, the screams of "liberal media" immediately start to shut that person up (as Keith Olbermann – the sole news media liberal – knows only too well). It goes back at least to the time of Reagan, when his scandals were always ignored until they became so overwhelming even "the liberal media" was forced to cover them. Look how many years it took for the fact that Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians to release the hostages in 1980 was even mentioned. I don’t believe to this day most Americans are aware of that enormous act of appeasement and betrayal by their ‘Great Communicator’, yet everyone knows who said “smoked but didn’t inhale”.

Good post.

One correction: the former MSNBC host is Joe Scarborough, not to be confused with long-time local NBC news anchor Chuck Scarborough. (Although Joe's first name does happen to be Charles.)

What next? WMD and "Al Qaeda"?

The myth of "democracy" and "free elections" is wearing pretty thin as well.

We need a new improved form of BS. We need it now.

From a CNN story on McClellan's book:

Fox News contributor and former White House adviser Karl Rove said on that network Tuesday that the excerpts from the book he's read sound more like they were written by a "left-wing blogger" than his former colleague.

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/27/mcclellan.book/index.html

And no, CNN does not mention McClellan's description of the "liberal media" even though they now also claim to have seen the entire book.

Anchor Olbermann counts on commentary to boost MSNBC's ratings

[...]

Jay Rosen, a media critic and journalism professor at New York University, believes that Olbermann's show is a fulfillment of his 2004 prediction of the rise of an "opposition press" in response to a deepening cultural divide and what he called bland media coverage of the Bush administration during its first term.

[...]

"In the last year, Keith Olbermann has basically put the idea of "opposition press" into practice," said Rosen. "Did journalism collapse? No. But his ratings went up, and a lot of things got said that needed to be said."

Olbermann's critics, however, see him as nothing more than a left-wing blowhard masquerading as a newscaster.

[...]

To be sure, Olbermann originally vowed not to "screw around with the news" when his show debuted in 2003. Then came that moment in August, when he found himself stuck on a plane on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport.

After reading that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had compared opponents of the Iraq War to Nazi sympathizers, he got out his pen and wrote a scorching critique of Rumsfeld, which began, "The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet or a quack."

"Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet," he added.

That became either his famous "Murrow moment" or his "Rummy Rant," depending on who's talking. After being posted on CrooksandLiars.com, the Rumsfeld commentary quickly gained traction, downloaded more than 300,000 times, and suddenly made Olbermann a player in the ongoing political and cultural wars.

Still, he's "a little mystified by the reaction because I don't see these [special comments] as being extraordinary. In other words, these merely are facts and analyses of facts that I think need to be made, and I haven't seen them done by anybody else."

He didn't grow up in a particularly political household, he says, and despite his identity as a kind of therapist for liberals, Olbermann resists being pigeonholed politically. "I'm not a liberal, I'm an American," he once told Salon.com. Today, he doesn't vote, although he says he would have voted for Richard Nixon in 1972 if he had been old enough.

"I was surrounded by people in high school who wore McGovern stickers on their heads," he recalled. "I saw Nixon as a fairly decent president who should get another term."The following summer, though, he watched the Watergate hearings, "and that was American history unfolding in front of me. I understood when Alex Butterfield came in the room and talked about a taping system, and I remember saying, 'Holy crap.'"

[...]

"'Countdown' was not designed as a political broadcast. It was not even a politically oriented newscast; it was just an hourlong news [show] with a different kind of approach to things," he said.

Although he tried to avoid commentary, "there's a point at which you can't sit inside a burning building without shouting 'fire,'" he said. "And that point has been reached, and I think it was reached at the point I was sitting on that tarmac at LAX."

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06346/745336-237.stm