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I'm not claiming that the Democrat leaders shouldn't speak up more, but I don't agree the media would report them if they did, for two reasons. First, I've watched too many stories where the media obviously lies. The whole Gore fiasco comes to mind. All networks and several papers were going to extremes to paint Gore as a liar and exagerator. They repeated Republican fantasies about Kailey Ellis, Love Canal, Love Story, etc, long after the facts had proven each story bogus. When you can point at specific issues where the media repeated lies they knew were lies, and all those lies are in the same direction, you can assume that the media is more interested in the message than in the truth. I got into a long discussion with an editor for the NYT over the Kathleene Seelye and the Love Canal story. There was no question of there being a political bias.
Second, Democrats were screaming at the top of their lungs during leadup to the invasion. Byrd and Kennedy especially were blasting away on the Senate floor against the invasion, and Democrats were sending stories to the media discounting a lot of Bush's reasons for invading. The media was almost completely silent on this, and CNN even had memoes leaked which gave instructions to their reporters to not show too many bodies, to not show anything that would paint the US in a negative light (that memo was over the Afghanistan invasion).
So I don't agree. I do agree that the Republicans are more aggressive at trying to spin the message, but I don't agree the media doesn't have an agenda. It isn't just Fox and Talk Radio. MSNBC, NBC, and CNBC are owned by GE, whose chairman was in the studios on election eve in 2000 calling for his tv stations to call the election for Bush. CNN is owned by AOL/Time Warner. Colin Powell was once on the board of AOL, and the Democrats tried to block their merger. ABC is a bit less right wing, but not as respected for news, and CBS is certainly left leaning, but again, not as respected.
There are other factors, of course. Media outlets try to keep expenses down by not doing their own investigating, and all the networks use the same basic rules to determine their stories, so none of the networks does anything independent of the others. It used to be that a network would try to be different with their leads, but now, the networks are embarrassed if their leads aren't the same as the other networks, barring the rare exclusive story.
And another angle is corporate sponsorship and fear of lawsuits. Corporate sponsors do control the message to some degree by threatening to pull adds if spin doesn't go their way. These same corporations can threaten to sue if a story goes against them, as well, and that, too, plays into politics.
Check out "Into the Buzzsaw," or read some of Greg Palast's dealings with the media. he had info dead to rights on the Florida election, and was told point blank that the American media was no longer going to cover election stories because they didn't want to stir up trouble. At one point, that was considered their job.
Democrats can scream until they are blue in the face, and many do, and the media flat out will ignore them. Ask Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy.
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