Sunday, October 3, 2021

Doublethink for Liberals

 

There's a genre of social media posts like this one, which depict right-wing media frantically giving free publicity to programs that in reality are very popular, among Republicans as well as Democrats.  It generates plenty of self-congratulatory snickering by liberal commenters, which is fun and fine.  In these dark times, we have to get our fun wherever we can.

It overlooks something important, though: ostensibly liberal corporate media have exactly the same take as Fox News on these programs.  It's why they boost right-wing Democrats like Joe Manchin as "moderates," who are merely concerned about how "we" are going to pay for these crazy socialistic pipe dreams.  (Meanwhile, they happily vote for even more expensive and wasteful military spending.)  It's why such media and pundits try to make it seem that a small hard core of communist Congressional progressives are trying to bully those reasonable "moderates" into accepting these very popular programs, and why those media were shocked when President Biden backed the progressives and stabbed the "moderates" in the back.

Noam Chomsky used to say that accusations against "liberal media" are very useful to the liberal media themselves.  They're perfectly happy to be regarded as the leftist extreme, because they see themselves as gatekeepers: we go as far as reasonable, responsible news media can go, and any farther is insane, irresponsible conspiracy-mongering extremism.  It makes them feel courageous.  And that's fine with me, because I don't have to accept their framing of the issues.  I know that they cover the news from the perspective of the investor class, which makes their positions entirely understandable.  Understandable, but dishonest and simply wrong.  Left-wing media, as I learned as far back as the 1960s, aren't always right, but their track record is much better than the corporate media's, and even if you aren't left-wing, you need to pay attention to the information and analysis they provide.  Most of the journalists I rely on aren't particularly left-wing anyway: they just look so by comparison to the "liberal" media.