The "Liberal" Media

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Networks don't give a shit about right leaning and left leaning, they care about who's watching and try to guage what their opinions on issues may be. They then focus on bringing those stories to gain viewers. The media isn't "left" or "right", it's just a business using the tools of marketing to gain a big enough viewing audience for advertisers.
  —onifre

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Hi onifre,Networks (or more pertinently their owners and employees) don't need to care about left/right politics in order to be biased. If their aim is to maximize advertising revenue, and most advertising revenue is sourced from capitalist enterprises who prefer to place their adverts in programs providing a rosy view of the capitalist business model, then a right wing bias will arise naturally without intention on the part of broadcasters.I believe that people on the right have a conception that the media is biased in favour of liberals because the networks are keen to be culturally liberal. They are happy to have gay men (not gay women so often, for some reason), an ethnic diversity of actors and presenters (more or less), perhaps a non-Christian or two, but you will rarely see an interview with an American leftist intellectual of economic matters. I believe that it is due to the fact that the cultural impacts of the left have become attractive to marketers because they appeal to the audience while not challenging the capitalist model of organization, while the economic ideas of the left are a direct challenge and are so not to be countenanced.All of this means that we can have pro-capitalist bias at the same time as a culturally anti-right bias; resulting in accusations that the media is both pro-liberal and pro-conservative. That's basically what the classic 90s Benetton ad campaign was. Economically capitalist while culturally progressive (at least that's what it was intended to be). The prediction of the model is that you will rarely if ever get a KKK member or David Harvey on screen but a Tom Friedman or Bono should be ok.I agree with an earlier poster that Fox is basically a one-off freak show departure from my model!CheersMick

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It's also not just attacks and misrepresentations, it's ignoring a huge part of the American public. The first Tea Party in Washington was enormous but you missed that coverage, didn't you?

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This just makes me smile. The left wing have had this experience for decades now. I was in London just prior to the current war in Iraq; there were two MILLION people on the streets, unprecedented in the history of Britain, whose voices were absolutely ignored. Yet these newfangled tea partiers think that their little thousand-strong demos should get the world transformed. It's quite funny, but quite sad at the same time. Shows how small their world is.

erm, no. I happen to live in the real world, not in the fantasy world constructed and maintained by Glenn Beck.

Faith, for all I know your handful of KKK-loving freaks may be the political wave of the future. All I'm saying is that people outside the US (and within it, though for some reason they're too afraid to say it) look at them and see a laughable bunch of retards who are - frankly - scary in their ignorance of both science and history. They are barely aware of the policital context of their own actions, ascribing "socialism" to a moderately right wing president. All I can say is, I hope they don't make life too miserable for the normal human beings living elsewhere in the United States, who by all accounts are pleasant people. The fact that these people who think that political activism involves putting a big teabag on top of their heads are constantly in the news, is depressing.I know these people are in financial straights and it is my character to support them - but they will have to get rid of the pantomime and stop behaving like sheep to corporate america before I can do it.

Re my message to faith above, the quoted material in this message is a perfect illustration of the mental subnormality of which I speak. I personally think Obama is a complete dick. As a politican he is a failure, unable to get anything he wants without incredibly costly buyouts of the corporate right. My opinion is not dependent upon his birth certificate nor his religion. But these right wing zealots- who might well have fair and sensible complaints to make- abandon rational discourse in favour of an endless and pointless discussion of Muslimhood

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What I would like to know is what is the difference whether he was Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Shintoist, Jewish, Confucianist, Taoist or Atheist? What has a person's religious beliefs to do with his capabilities to govern? Anymore than what would be the difference whether a candidate was male or female; whether the candidate was heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual; whether the candidate was white, black or anything else? What has any of this got to do with issues? People should vote on issues not the person.

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Well, you've conjured up an image of a bisexual Hindu black woman as president of the USA. There are so many reasons that's not going to work (all of them rooted in popular prejudice). Having a straight male black Christian doesn't seem to be working so well, with a mass movement formed who would seem to want to lynch him at the first opportunity, despite his promotion of policies that were favoured by Nixon.

Yeah me too! Also wouldn't mind her as a girlfriendEdited by mick, : No reason given.