I knew my posting yesterday about conservative media bias would get conservatives in a lather. Despite the fact that the Republican Party has the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, its own 24 hour news channel, eight out of nine weekday Prime Time news hours and talk radio hegemony, Republicans still like to fancy themselves a put-upon minority.
I wrote the posting because Fox News' second rudest host, Sean Hannity, is openly campaigning for Republican Senator Rick Santorum without being either reprimanded, fired or called-on-the-carpet by either his network or the media. This soft bigotry of low expectations for conservative media stars -- who can't be expected to meet the same standards other news people meet -- has a certain history. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough appeared on behalf of President Bush during the 2004 campaign. Scarborough has five hours a week of prime time during which he regularly bitches about liberals controlling the media. After his campaign appearances he spent a lot of that time telling the country how great President Bush is and how vile Democrats are.
My point was that supposedly liberal media have to live by a different set of rules than conservatives. That's because conservatives control the media agenda. They're able to elevate itty, bitty little things into national issues by repeating them over and over whether they're true or not. When liberals who do something bad -- Dan Rather's misadventures come to mind -- the conservatives go apeshit, forcing the subject into more rational media. When conservatives do something bad -- mocking the medals of a decorated combat veteran, for example, on the floor of the Republican National Convention -- there's no liberal noise machine to amp it up into the public consciousness. The protective conservative logic is that they can do whatever they want because they're an oppressed minority. It's the same logic as that used by '60s retreads who claim that blacks can't be racist because they were discriminated against themselves.
I asked my regular reader for a single example of a liberal newscaster allowed to raise money for a political candidate. This request, you'll be shocked to discover, belched forth Dan Rather's name. I suspect Rather will be used as evidence of media bias hundreds of years into the future because he once gave a speech at a Travis County, Texas, Democratic fund-raiser. It was a bad and obvious choice, and having spent a certain amount of time with Rather while writing a magazine profile, I believe that had he known it to be a fund raiser he wouldn't have appeared. Rather, whatever his underlying biases (and neuroses), was not one to make obviously partisan gestures. Still, even if you believe Danbo was doing it out of naked political animosity, you can't deny that for his trouble he was reprimanded by CBS and both the conservative and supposedly liberal media.
Rather's mortal sin, however, was flashing documents to provide visual juice to dry facts about President Bush's inadmirable military service. While the documents proved false, the facts they illustrated were either already well established or have not since been disproven. This enormous act of liberal media bias resulted in Rather losing his job.
Normal people might not use Rather as great evidence of the way the media coddle liberals, since, after all, he got fired for it. I wouldn't use Hannity and Scarborough to make my case that conservatives live by different rules if Scarborough and Hannity had been fired for their activities. But they haven't been, and aren't going to be, and that's the point.
Another comment made the following claim:
Everyone knows Hannity and Scarborough are right-wingers, so it doesn't
raise a stink. A lot of the network anchors lean to the left, but try
to pretend they're objective. Being human beings, of course, they
aren't. Nothing wrong with that, but I wish they'd own up to it.
In other words, the media people are all liberal but they hide it so you can't tell.
So, to recap: One anchorman fired for sloppy reporting caused by liberal bias, and other liberals in the media hiding their bias so you need to deconstruct newscasts to even see that it's even there, is a greater sin that a coordinated, out-of-the-closet series of media empires openly working toward a common political outcome on behalf of a single political party. Included in this coordination is not simply reporting the news the way the Republicans want it reported, but also allowing network personalities to go out and actively campaign and raise money for that party.
And conservatives are serious, right? They really believe that liberals have the upper hand?