What May Be My Single Biggest Complaint With The Mainstream Media

Over at the Daily Caller, Mark Judge has written an excellent column called, Why Americans hate journalists. Here’s an excerpt that captures the essence of how the MSM treats conservatives today,

On October 3, 2010, exactly 31 years after Greenfield’s column, the Post ran an op-ed on Glenn Beck that was written by Dana Milbank. What is stunning about the piece is not that Milbank hates Beck, but Milbank’s rank cowardice. Unlike Greenfield, Milbank wrote his piece before he did any research. Milbank points to Beck’s dislike of Woodrow Wilson; Beck hates the former president, writes Milbank, because he was a leader in the Progressive Era, which “was the time of muckrakers and such things as the struggle to abolish child labor, break up monopolies, clean up meat-processing plants and give women the right to vote. For Beck, this was a dark time.”

Through a rhetorical sleight of hand, Milbank has accused Beck of being against child labor laws and women’s right to vote (the part about muckrakers is also a nice self-indulgent touch – oh Dana, what would we do without you brave diggers for truth?). He, Milbank, doesn’t engage in the recent conservative reassessment of Woodrow Wilson as an imperialist and racist. He doesn’t consult a history book, call Beck on the phone, or refer to Jonah Goldberg’s bestseller “Liberal Fascism,” which has a major section devoted to Wilson. He simply refuses to. Milbank is not here to find answers or challenge assumptions. He is here to propagandize.

As part of their dedication to causes but not truths, modern journalists also simply refuse to cover certain things. I noticed this when I became a conservative in the early 1990s. When I had been a liberal, the things I was interested in were covered by the media. I grew up in Washington; books I read were covered by the Washington Post, as were liberal political rallies I attended and lectures by left-wingers. When I converted to the dark side of the force and moved right, suddenly I was in a world that didn’t exist in the media. People and things I found fascinating simply did not exist for local editors.

Bernard Goldberg would probably say that the sort of bias you see described there is a result of living in a liberal bubble, not malicious bias, but intentional or not, it’s ever present.

Conservatives are constantly forced to restate what we believe largely because the supposedly “unbiased” mainstream media doesn’t understand or even care about conservative reasoning. On the rare occasions when they do happen to give their readers a peek behind the conservative curtain, they make sure to write it in a way that suggests the conservative is lying.

Sure, those conservatives may SAY they’re afraid America will end up like Greece, but it’s really about the President being black. They may SAY they support the rule of law, but they support building a fence because they hate Hispanics. Those Righties claim they want to keep Social Security and Medicare from going broke, but they really hate old people. The undertone inevitably suggests that the conservative is lying, even when all objective evidence points in the other direction. Yet, that withering cynicism immediately disappears when the very same reporters are covering liberals. Suddenly, those hard bitten, distrustful ink stained wretches take everything at face value.

Perhaps those of us in the new media on the Right should be grateful: After all, if people like Dana Milbank did their jobs, there probably wouldn’t be a need for people like us. For the most part, the conservative blogosphere, Rush Limbaugh, and even Fox News have risen up as a reaction to the unfair treatment conservatives get in the mainstream media. Still, people are seldom grateful for the sort of malevolence and/or incompetence that defines how the MSM handles conservative issues. I’m certainly not. I root for papers to go under and smile when I hear about people at MSM outlets losing their jobs. These supposedly neutral media outlets have unjustifiably treated people like us as their enemies for years and schadenfreude goes along with the territory when people like that finally get their just desserts.

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