Darn That Liberal Media, Pt. 2

Eric Alterman explores how the media tends to blow off and insult liberals, even when they are in fact right. This has been the trend for a few years now, but the rise of the blogosphere and more access for giving feedback to journalists/pundits has lead to a pushback. This pushback has lead many media reporters to get territorial and become hostile to bloggers (ie. Time magazine's Joe Klein). But Alterman that these insults occur at the expense of the truth...

The Alito hearings may not have revealed much about the new Supreme Court Associate Justice's constitutional views, but they did highlight the pro-Bush bias that continues to characterize most mainstream debate. CNN's Wolf Blitzer, as reliable a weather vane for conventional wisdom as can be found anywhere, continually skewed his coverage to reflect the Republican Party's talking points, announcing, "Some Democrats are delivering an early verdict on Alito's performance" without asking whether Republicans were doing the same...

...Liberal war opponents were clearly correct about the self-defeating stupidity of Bush's Iraq misadventure, but pundits treat their foresight as a kind of disqualifying handicap...

... [Time's Joe] Klein writes, "A strong majority would favor the NSA program...if its details were declassified and made known." In fact, when an Associated Press poll asked Americans if the Bush Administration should be required to get a warrant before wiretapping, 56 percent answered affirmatively....

...[W]hat Klein mocks as fetishism and a Vietnam hangover is the law of the land, according to fourteen scholars of constitutional law and former government officials who wrote to Congress that "the program appears on its face to violate existing law." The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service also reported that it is "unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations," and added that the Bush/Klein argument "does not seem to be...well-grounded."

So here, apparently, is the punditocracy argument in a nutshell: Never mind that liberals are constitutionally correct. Never mind that their view is supported by a majority of Americans. And never mind that the Bush Administration has repeatedly lied to the American people on exactly these issues. Never mind, most of all, the truth.

PS- Atrios looks at Joe Klein's Shiavo flip-flop as an example of this attitude.