Msm and the Dems Got It Wrong Again

What began roughly a decade ago every bit frustration from Democrats over coverage of President Nib Clinton's impeachment and adulterous escapades, has morphed into an informally organized rapid response network, ready to pounce on any and all perceived slights against Barack Obama at the easily of the media.

Netroots push back against MSM 'bias'

If you asked a random sample of progressive Democrats and liberal bloggers to describe the current state of political media, from CNN to The New York Times, in that location's one give-and-take that's unlikely to come up upwards: "liberal."

For those on the left, the more operative words these days are "mainstream," "establishment," or "traditional." And if one is feeling particularly aggrieved, the clarification of choice is increasingly — and surprisingly — "bourgeois."

Gone are the days when merely the right howled about bias and malice from network anchors and star political reporters. What began roughly a decade ago as frustration from Democrats over coverage of President Neb Clinton's impeachment and adulterous escapades has morphed into an informally organized rapid response network, ready to pounce on whatever and all perceived media slights confronting Barack Obama.

Clearly, bloggers aren't a monolithic group. Only it's fair to say that liberal bloggers — and the more activist-oriented members of the Netroots within that group — have been calling out the media's entrada coverage with far more regularity than simply four years ago. And it's not only because at that place are more than activists who know how Moveable Type works.

Pushback against the media has been aided by the growth of more sophisticated liberal news sites, such as Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post. In 2004, TPM founder Josh Marshall didn't accept any paid staffers; this year he has nine. And Arianna Huffington'south arsenal of nearly 2,000 bloggers didn't exist until President Bush was already six months into his second term. Not to mention, liberal watchdog group Media Matters — which provides ammo to many bloggers — has grown in that fourth dimension from most 20 staffers to near 100, according to a source familiar with the arrangement.

Criticism from the left can accept a variety of forms, including fact-checking, aggregating links and sometimes original reporting. Also, similar to the right's strategy over decades of "working the refs," there are left-leaning bloggers who provide a genu-jerk dismissal of whatever'south on the front page of the Times or making the rounds on Sunday chat shows.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who co-authored with Jerome Armstrong the seminal Netroots tract, "Crashing the Gates," said in an east-mail that he's found political coverage to be "utterly vapid, devoid of context, oftentimes incorrect, and wedded to narratives that defy all logic and reality."

Trolling a handful of the height liberal blogs, information technology's obvious that Moulitsas' critique isn't isolated.

Liberal bloggers frequently heighten the issue of how Al Gore and John Kerry were treated by the printing and have adopted a "never again" approach to the 2008 race. Bloggers raise a ruckus when they believe the media is focusing too heavily on superficial bug rather than policy. Some examples: bloggers cried foul when the national press kept writing about whether Obama wore a flag lapel pin, as well as the various narratives discussed as clouding his chances in November — inexperience, overly eloquent, arrogant, besides skinny, also black or non blackness enough. And don't mention Bittergate, Obama's now infamous thoughts about Americans who own guns and go to church, to a left-of-eye blogger, either.

"Liberals believe that they can't get a off-white shake from the media anymore," said Eric Alterman, media critic and author of the 2003 book "What Liberal Media?"

So when liberals feel the media is misrepresenting something important, Alterman said, they respond quickly. "That'south an verbal mirror of what the right did with talk radio," he added.

Alterman, like several liberal writers interviewed, said that he considers the bulk of Beltway journalists to exist socially liberal but "corrupted by their need to be part of the institution."

It'due south that seeming coziness to power — on display during the White House Correspondents' Clan Dinner or when a slew of Pulitzer Prize winners took the stand up in the CIA leak trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby — that has stuck in the left's craw.

Alterman said there were three moments that led to the electric current dissatisfaction with the national press: the Clinton impeachment proceeding (which spawned MoveOn.org), the media's handling of the 2000 election recount and the run-up to the Republic of iraq war.

"Ane of the hallmarks of Netroots culture was a complete disconnect from history — meaning, basically, annihilation that had happened earlier 1998," New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai wrote in "The Statement," his 2007 book on the modern Democratic Political party.

"So burning was [the Netroots'] contempt for 'Washington insiders' and the 'mainstream media' that they were moved to dismiss not just the individuals who cruel into these categories, only all the noesis such people had accumulated," Bai continued.

Having spent a considerable amount of time with constituents of what former presidential candidate Howard Dean had described as "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," Bai said he found that "the disdain for the media is a key tenant of the philosophy. It'south one of the boxes to check."

Other chroniclers have reached similar conclusions. The New Republic'southward Jonathan Chait, in an 8,000-discussion article on the movement last year, wrote that the "Netroots look upon this bang-up right-wing apparatus with unconcealed envy," following in the footsteps — operationally, not ideologically — of conservative activists such every bit Grover Norquist who have turned attacking the media into a pastime.

And like their conservative brethren, the new left has, in Bai'southward words, "a fury at institutional media like The New York Times."

Information technology's non hard to find liberal bloggers calling out the Grayness Lady in today'due south political media environment. Earlier this month, when The Associated Press described the Times as belonging to the "liberal media," one Daily Kos author asked, "Since when does anyone besides toolbag Republicans consider the media to exist liberal?"

Of course, the Times isn't lone in being skewered by the left. The Washington Postal service — one time lauded past liberal Democrats every bit the paper that took downward President Richard Nixon — is also a target.
Dana Milbank, the old New Republic writer-turned-Washington Mail columnist, has seen his share of catcalls.

"I recollect we've reached a betoken where, by volume, there'southward far more than on the left," Milbank said regarding criticism of his work. Although the "media criticism industry was dominated by conservatives," he added, it's been tilting left since 2004.

For instance, the liberal blogosphere became inflamed by Milbank's July 30 column in which he wrote that Obama was shifting from "presumptive nominee" to "presumptuous nominee." In that article, Milbank quoted Obama as saying in a meeting with House members that he had "become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." The following day, additional context was revealed, indicating that Obama might actually have been speaking more than humbly.

While the right lauded the cavalcade, the left reacted with headlines including Daily Kos' "Dana Milbank is a Course-A Moron." TPM produced a nearly 10-infinitesimal video compilation of overheated pundit reactions to the column. And vi different Huffington Post writers weighed in with pieces such as "Context, Schmontext at WaPo" and "Obama's Good day and a Columnist's Bad One."

Just Milbank's not the only Post staffer who's been dropped from the left's Christmas carte list.

"I used to get a lot more on the right," said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq war. More recently, the left has picked autonomously columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.

"If yous're a piffling bit disquisitional of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face," Cohen said, calculation that his liberal critics "were born as well late, because they would accept been great communists."

Matt Stoller, a political consultant and editor of OpenLeft, agreed there's more pushback than in the final bike, "because we're merely better at it than we were four years ago."

"The people on the left no longer meet the media as a third-party intermediary," Stoller said. "They just see information technology every bit role of the political campaign. You go after media figures as if they're role of the opposition campaign. It's how they need to be treated."

Veteran political reporter Joe Klein learned about such treatment when he began blogging in January 2007 for Fourth dimension magazine's new feature, Swampland.

When asked about criticism from bloggers, Klein responded in an e-mail that he's getting more from the right these days, merely has "certainly taken my share of hits from the left on FISA and other bug."

"I find that intemperance is intemperance from whichever direction it's coming," Klein said. "The methods used are e'er the same: quotes taken out of context or chopped autonomously with ellipses, advertizing hominem attacks, etc. Merely I practice notice the wide-brush dismissal of the mainstream media very frustrating, especially at this moment when we're staggering toward the boneyard."

Also Klein, there are several other frequent targets, such equally The New York Times' Adam Nagourney. On the television side, ABC'south George Stephanopoulos, who in one case helped Clinton get elected president, has become persona non grata among many liberal Democrats in 2008, post-obit his co-moderating of a Autonomous contend in April. (Incidentally, more than 20 Huffington Mail service bloggers wrote on the affair, fifty-fifty calling his operation "shameful").

But it's not only the mainstream media taking hits, but even sites that might correspond a new "mainstream" amid the left. Similar to the right'south willingness to telephone call out their own when straying from the flock, liberal bloggers take acted accordingly.

MyDD's Armstrong, often referred to as the "blogfather," said many liberal bloggers don't call back the 1990s or the two previous presidential campaigns. "From my perspective, Obama's got it pretty good," Armstrong said.

An enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries, Armstrong said that "fifty-fifty on MyDD, which is a liberal blog, every fourth dimension I criticize Obama, I go a huge amount of slack from his supporters."

Indeed, that morn, Armstrong wrote that "Obama is definitely the weakest nominee that Democrats have put upwardly this decade." Commenters quickly pounced, maxim Armstrong was "factually wrong," "ridiculous," and promoting his "usual BS."

"It's like I've been a traitor to the Democratic Party," Armstrong said.

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Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/08/netroots-push-back-against-msm-bias-012775

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