Another Serving of
"Liberal Media" ?...
Yet another part of a continueing series
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Leading the charge against the accusations of an overarching all inclusive liberal media bias is Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News. Alterman is a Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, a media columnist for The Nation, a blogger for MSNBC.com, a senor fellow at the Center for American Progress, and an author of five other books.

Alterman points out “Republicans of all stripes have done quite well for themselves during the past five decades fulminating about the liberal cabal/ progressive thought police who spin, supplant and sometimes suppress the news we all consume”. Alterman goes on to highlight the success of such a wide array of unarguably conservative news media from Fox News to The Weekly Standard and Limbaugh, stating “no sensible person can dispute the existence of a conservative media”. He also acknowledges there is also a liberal media saying “it is tiny and profoundly under funded compared with its conservative counterpart”.[i]

In the Nation article “After You, My Dear Alphonse” columnist Katha Pollitt asks “What's the matter with conservatives? They have the White House, both houses of Congress, the majority of governorships and more money than God. They rule talk-radio and the TV political chat shows, and they get plenty of space in the papers; for all the talk about the liberal media, nine out of the fourteen most widely syndicated columnists are conservatives. What I want to know is why can't they just admit it, throw a big party and dance on the table with lampshades on their heads? Why are they always claiming to be excluded and silenced because most English professors are Democrats?

She goes on to observe for conservatives it seems that “running the country turns out to be harder than it looked... [Bill Clinton] made it seem so easy! Now, unemployment is way up, the government's awash in red ink, Iraq is a mess. So, everything has to be someone else's fault... They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it”.[ii]

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[i] Alterman, E. (2003, February 24). What Liberal Media? Nation, 276, Issue 7.

[ii] Pollitt, K. (2003, October 20). After You, My Dear Alphonse. Nation, 277, Issue 12.