The Nation: TIME magazine columnists are "obsessively abusive to liberals"

the liberal media | posted May 25, 2006 (June 12, 2006 issue)
Time Is on Their Side
Eric Alterman

In recent years, Time, America's largest-circulation newsweekly, winner of the 2006 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and undoubtedly the nation's most influential magazine, has morphed into a kind of glossy sibling to the Wall Street Journal. Like the Journal, its hard news pages remain home to generally reliable, often excellent (though sometimes frivolous) political reporting. But its opinion pages are filled with vitriol, anger and abuse, almost always directed at liberals.

During much of the 1980s and early '90s, Time had a relatively balanced set of political contributors, boasting pundits Michael Kinsley and Barbara Ehrenreich in its back pages, Margaret Carlson with a chatty reported column inside and Roger Rosenblatt all over the place. But all are gone today; in addition to the fire-breathing neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer on the back page, there's Andrew Sullivan and Joe Klein. Of course, Sullivan is famously gay and has soured in his devotion to George W. Bush, and Klein frequently praises the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. But both writers share with Krauthammer a desire to paint liberals--and most Democrats--as either crazy or treasonous, and often both.

One could easily fill this magazine with examples of these writers' vicious comments about almost anyone they associate with the left. Sullivan notoriously suggested that Gore voters could not be trusted to be loyal Americans after 9/11; when Al Gore tried to expose the Bush Administration's lies about Iraq and save this country from catastrophe, Klein said "he looked like a madman" while Krauthammer, who parroted the same lies, joked that the ex-VP had "gone off his lithium."

Time's chosen columnists are not only abusive to liberals and Democrats; they are obsessive about their abusiveness. I was present recently when Klein shouted from the back of a room that "the message of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is that they hate America."* Klein returns to no topic so frequently as those "harsh and stupid" Democrats who "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth." Sullivan, for his part, recently took the occasion of the death of John Kenneth Galbraith to opine that "the only response to a person like that is sadness mixed with contempt." Krauthammer, meanwhile, describes Democrats as "rank hypocrites" with "nothing to offer on Social Security...nothing to offer on the war in Iraq...nothing to offer on the idea of how to manage ourselves in the UN...obstructionist." Moreover, "they have trashed two centuries of tradition." All three regularly accuse liberals of rooting for the enemy in Iraq, always without evidence (for a more extensive sample of Time columnists' comments in the magazine and elsewhere, see Media Matters: http://mediamatters.org/items/200604120012)...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060612/alterman

I think it is on point for that forum.

:-)

you want to find posts on the media and it's bias.

time is "abusive to Liberals"..that's why I cancelled my subscription years ago.

They sent me a note asking why. I responded that I no longer felt compelled to be civil to the enablers of fascism.

"America needs at this moment a moral leader, a national moral leader. The outstanding national moral leader of the world today is Mussolini." - Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine, 1928

"The moral force of Fascism, appearing in totally different forms in different nations, may be the inspiration for the next general march of mankind." - Henry Luce, 1934

Mussolini got the cover five times before World War 2.

'from the beginning.' Chilling!

"moral force of facism"
"general march of mankind"

paper money, too much insulation prevents you from dealing with the harsher realities outside your doorstep. This appears to be the case with TimeWarner

Time Warner corporate website
http://www.timewarner.com/corp/

However, the Time magazine editor who turned over Matt Cooper's notes etc

Journalist at center of leak probe criticizes Time boss
Reporter says probe cooperation could hamper newsgathering
Sunday, July 17, 2005
http://rss.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/17/cooper.sources/index.html

should know that no one knowing of Time's conservative 'bent' should be talking to them in the first place. This goes for Fox News, but that's a given.

When 'journalism' is all about the money and not about reality the free marketplace of ideas will exact its own sort of special vengeance.

BTW, peruse CJR's 'Who Owns What' re Time Warner and you'll note they own CNN, notable of late for their allowance of PsyOps in the newsroom

Who Owns What
http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/timewarner.asp

CNN and PsyOps
www.counterpunch.org/cnnpsyops.html

The funny thing about Time magazine's harping about liberals is that (shock !), liberals aren't in power in any of the three branches of our government.

since the Reagan era, and it is working.

Even some Democrats have been trained to hate liberals and to consider themselves as conservative, even though their political philosophy is basically very liberal.

Liberals, from Jefferson to FDR to Conyers and Kucinich, have been primarily responsible for fighting for and maintaining freedom and democracy in America.

And this is exactly why the fascists work so hard at painting liberals as the bogeyman. Up until now, liberals have prevented a fascist takeover of America, and the fascists need to get rid of the liberals so that there is little or no more opposition to their goal of creating a fascist totalitarian state in America.

During the Clinton years, my husband subscribed (free deal)
and we called it "BlowJob Weekly". Because the BJ was
it main topic EVERY WEEK. We couldn't let the kids SEE IT!

One issue was actually the "ALL BLOWJOB EDITION".

I still come across them at garage sales.

And NO, I wouldn't pay for BJ Weekly if it were the
last magazine on earth.

...and I LOVE subscribing to magazines.

...since the right has convinced them that there was some sort of liberal bias in the media in the last few dacades. The fucksticks at the MRC and other rightist media watchdog groups have managed to convince many in the media that they have unfairly slighted conservative voices throughout the 60's, 70's, and 80's. So they see the stifling of liberal voices as acheiving an overdue sense of balance.

Unfortunately, it's all bullshit. The media used to be objective, and like Stephen Colbert says, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

decades. Even when they couldn't spin something, they would cover it up by fawning over Poppy's graciousness, integrity, or patriotism. In other words - they lied like hell for him at every turn.

Could they REALLY be THAT stupid?

When MediaMatters published their famous survey of the sunday morning pundit shows and concluded that liberals were being slighted, ABC retorted by insisting that by placing their shows in a larger historical context, one could see that there was a slight (like a 2% or something) overbooking of liberals during the Clinton Years on This Week. So they corrected that balance by WAY overbooking conservative pundits in the Bush Years. :eyes:

...unless one uses RW definitions of who's a "liberal"

A 50/50 balance is still too much liberalism for rightists, so they convince others that guys like David Broder or Joe Klein are liberals, then give those guys token slots on the chat shows. Then they can point to them and say, "See? We give liberals a voice..."

Liberal bias: the absence of conservative bias.

It used to be the rule in the broadcast media that for every conservative you booked, you had to book a liberal, and vice versa. But the cons successfully lobbied the FCC to get the rule overturned (in the Reagan years, IIRC), knowing full well that it would lead to a right-wing media takeover. Read any conservative history of their movement, and they will openly boast of their "achievement".

Congress has twice tried to bring back the Fairness Doctrine since Reagan's FCC killed it. But enabling legislation was vetoed once by Reagan and once by Poppy Bush.

We need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and break up the corporate broadcast media oligopoly.

Welcome to DU, nxylas! :hi:

That definition hasn't applied since the mid-'70s.
The horse that Reagan rode in on redefined it as:

Liberal Bias: insufficient conservative bias.

I cancelled Time in the late 90's. And I see they've gone way downhill since then. I agree with everything Alterman writes here except that they somehow don't notice the extreme vitriol towards liberals. I feel it's very deliberate.

Somebody had to say something good about Time

. . . deserves to be nothing more than a nasty piss sponge for my dog.

"American Revolutionary" my ACE.

Thank you for this. I knew that both Newsweek (subscribe to that, too) and Time were very anti-democrat. I just needed to read this to get my resolve.


Since the media seems unable/unwilling to be objective and non-partisan, there is no reason to pay money to read what they write. I now get almost all my news from the internet.

Goodbye, Time and Newsweek. Too bad you chose profit over integrity.

Pharmaceutical companies are huge TIME advertisers, along with every global corporation that is exploiting cheap labor in India, China, and other third world countries without decent labor laws. On top of those, we have the domestic agribusinesses that import cheap labor constantly present in TIME. Just look at the ads, guys.

Subscription fees are trivial compared to the advertising income, and only serve to give the advertisers a warm fuzzy that the circulation numbers are solid - not throwaway.

He is a breath of fresh air and rationality in a news media dominated today by rank hypocrisy.

Didn't they name hitler "man of the year?"

It's in recognition for the person who had most impact that year bad or good. Hitler made a huge impact that year (1939?) and it turned out an even bigger impact later.

:hi:

may have been at one time a human being.

Harpers, The Nation and Guardian and Observer are my preferred reading, especially The Guardian. Why bother with Time when one can get a steady dose of Monbiot and Palast and their guest pieces cover more about the US than anything the WP or NYT ever dreamed of doing.
For "local" reading with great reporting, cartoons and editorials, the lowly non-corporate Anniston Star is fantastic if one is interested in southeastern events.

...And the horse you rode in on, Democrats!

This is not exactly news, but the national Democratic Party is one big stinking dead horse. If they could muster only 15 votes against a man who has overseen the most extensive and intrusive violation of privacy in American history (although ``outright rape`` is a better term for what the Bush gang has done to Americans` constitutional and human rights), then what in God`s name are they good for? Sure, old Peeper-Creeper Hayden would have been confirmed in any case, given the Republicans` bootlicking obedience to the White House, but couldn`t the Democrats at have made a pretense of opposition? Couldn`t they have at least registered the slightest demurral against Hayden`s nomination?

No, they could not. They are a fetid sack of quivering jellyfish: spineless, boneless, brainless, useless. Now watch them come begging for your money between now and November: ``Oh please, give generously to our noble cause! We`re the only ones who can save you from the big bad Bushists!``

No, you`re not. You won`t stand up now, why should you stand up later? You won`t do anything except the same damn thing you`ve been doing for the past five years: acting as eager, willing enablers of evil. You`ve done it again today with this vote. You`ll do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.

God Almighty, what a shameful day.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=670&Itemid=1

This guy must be lying through his teeth. :sarcasm:

in my history class, our teacher was telling us about cuba, and the annexation of the philippines, when president McKinley was in charge, i think it was late or middle 1800", but anyways, we read a play that talk about yellow journalist, and yellow journalist is when someone exaggerates the truth, for example, in one part, the usa navy boat was destroy, and there was no evidence on who or what causes it, the reporters blame it on the Spanish, spain, not the natives, and so usa have a mini war with spain, and the spanish gave cuba it independence, and the usa annex the philippines, Puerto rico, guam, and that one place, i forgot, but anyways, there was this really famous quote by one of the owner of a major newspapers, he said "you (the yellow journalist) give me a story and i will give you a war."

hey anyways, what is y'all duer opinion on that newspaper owner quote, "you give me a story, i will give you a war." i want feed back, also, you think that newsweek, times, and other media are like that, that many of them are just yellow journalist.

This is news? OK, OK....like dot-to-dot....you knew all along there were a hell of a lot of dots there, and that there was an ugly pattern....still, you can't help being a bit shocked when it turns out to be the face of a Bavarian lance corporal with a funny moustache.

I can't believe anybody took anything written in that rag seriously.

Its like reading cartoons or corporate lie-week, but really, to puff up
any feathers that it was ever journalism is a bit rich.