Darn That Liberal Media, Pt. 2,474!

Tom Tomorrow has a preview from Jeff Cohen's new book 'Cable News Confidential'-

For two decades, I’ve been preoccupied with one issue above all others: that both ends of the political spectrum get their say in the media. One reason (among many) that I worked so hard to retire George W. Bush in 2004 was my nightmare that a defeated John Kerry would be hired by cable news to represent “the left” day after day on a TV debate show.

Fox News Channel often gets blamed for the standard format that pits forceful, articulate rightwingers against wimpy, halting liberals. Fox’s pairing of righty heartthrob Sean Hannity with back-pedaling, barely left-of-center Alan Colmes is a prime example of this lopsided format.

But it’s wrong to blame Fox for television’s center-right, GE-to-GM spectrum. That format was firmly in place years before there was a Fox News. The real culprits: CNN and PBS.

Take Crossfire, started by CNN in 1982 as the only nightly forum on national TV purporting to offer an ideological battle between co-hosts of left and right. Crossfire’s co-host “on the left” for the first seven years was a haplessly ineffectual centrist, Tom Braden, a guy who makes Alan Colmes look like an ultraleft firebrand.

In CNN’s eyes, Braden apparently earned his leftist credentials by having been a high-level CIA official—ironically enough, in charge of covert operations against the political left of Western Europe. Braden was paired on Crossfire with ultrarightist Pat Buchanan. During the Braden-Buchanan years, LSD guru Timothy Leary told a reporter that watching Crossfire was like watching “the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.” It may have been Leary’s most sober observation ever...

...The taboo against genuine progressives as hosts was even clearer when Crossfire needed substitutes “on the left” and CNN chose Beltway centrists like Jodie Powell (President Carter’s press secretary) and Morton Kondracke (yes, the guy now on Fox . . . and no, he was no more progressive then). These were men who would never declare themselves to be “on the left” in real life; they seemed to wince when CNN made them say it on television....

...Seeing liberals on TV back-pedal night after night in the face of the Buchanans and Hannitys helps create a public image of the American Left as weak, evasive, lacking in values—and the American Right as clear, firm and moral. Pundit TV has defined not only a skewed spectrum of debate but a road map for defeat of liberal politicians.

Imagine if the American Right had been represented year after year on TV not by the Buchanans and Hannitys, but by Republican pundits allied with Christine Todd Whitman and Arlen Spector—moderates dismissive of their party’s activists.

Now imagine that the American Left had been represented on TV not by the Bradens, Kinsleys and Colmeses, but by progressive pundits like Barbara Ehrenreich and Jim Hightower.

Neither scenario is easy to imagine—which says a lot about the real bias of TV news.

He's got another great excerpt too: “Ann Coulter and Me”

I watched that buffoon James Carville on 'The Colbert Report'; seeing his oral farts that passed as speech reminded that he too was once considered a representative voice of liberals by CNN's 'Crossfire'. It speaks volumes of the low opinion cable news has for actual liberals and how odd it would be to actually see one on TV. I could also go on a rant about Phil Donahue's removal from MSNBC just before the start of the Iraq war (Donahue made the mistake of refusing to properly cheerlead for it). His replacement- Keith Olbermann- likely surprised MSNBC by being as liberal as he is, and sadly these days seem too preoccupied wishing he was Ed Murrow to really create a voice of his own. Oh well, that's why Al Gore created the internet- so liberals would have somewhere to go.