The Consortiumnews.com -- Price of the 'Liberal Media' Myth by Robert Parry.

This is such an important story and such a prevailing myth that I am excerpting large amounts of this article and posting some of the links below. People should read the full article and not my digest if they have time. Italics will be mine below.

On one hand, the Right’s long-held conviction that the media is the enemy helps explain the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude of many conservatives, plus their motivation for investing billions of dollars to build a dedicated conservative media. That well-oiled media machine now stretches from TV networks to talk radio to newspapers to magazines to books to the Internet – and helps set the U.S. political agenda.

On the other hand, the endless repetition of the “liberal media” myth has sedated liberals who have avoided a commitment to develop a comparable media infrastructure, apparently out of a hope that one is not needed.

Whatever the answer, the “liberal media” myth has proved so useful to conservatives that they continue to promote it even after mainstream news organizations – including the New York Times and the Washington Post – joined in “press riots” over Bill Clinton’s Whitewater real estate investment and Al Gore’s supposed exaggerations, trivial issues that paved the way for Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 and Gore’s loss of the White House in 2000, respectively.

One view is that the durability of the “liberal media” myth is a testament to today's conservative media power – that simple repetition from a wide enough circle of voices will convince a gullible portion of any population that a lie is the truth. That’s especially the case when there are few voices arguing to the contrary.

A survey conducted before Election 2000 by the industry magazine, Editor & Publisher, found a strong bias in favor of George W. Bush among top editorial decision-makers nationwide.

Newspaper editors and publishers favored Bush by a 2-to-1 margin, according to the survey of nearly 200 editors and publishers. Publishers, who are at the pinnacle of power within news organizations, were even more pro-Bush, favoring the then-Texas governor by a 3-to-1 margin, E&P reported. Gazing through the rose colors of their pro-Bush glasses, the news executives incorrectly predicted a Bush electoral landslide in November 2000.

Right-wing media magnate Murdoch owns the conservative Weekly Standard, the New York Post and the national cable network Fox News, which he’s staffed with prominent conservative journalists, such as Brit Hume and Tony Snow, and star commentators, such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

At the helm of Fox News, Murdoch put Republican political strategist Roger Ailes, who became famous in the 1988 presidential race for advising George H.W. Bush to use tough-on-crime rhetoric to paint Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis as soft on violent criminals.

General Electric Co.’s Chairman Welch revealed a similar favoritism for Bush while visiting the election desk of GE’s NBC News subsidiary on Election Night 2000. In front of the NBC staff, Welch rooted for a Bush victory, asking apparently in jest, "how much would I have to pay you to call the race for Bush?" according to witnesses.

Later, after Fox News declared Bush the winner, Welch allegedly asked the chief of the NBC election desk why NBC was not doing the same, a choice NBC did make and then retracted. Though premature, the pro-Bush calls colored the public impression of Bush's entitlement to the presidency during the month-long Florida recount battle.

Welch and Murdoch are far from the only network chieftains to be ardent Republicans, as columnist Joe Conason has noted. “So was Larry Tisch when he owned CBS. So are Richard Parsons and Steve Case of CNN (and Time Warner AOL),” Conason wrote at Salon.com. “Michael Eisner (Disney ABC) gave to Bill Bradley and Al Gore, but he gave more to Bush and McCain – and he supported Rick Lazio for the Senate against Hillary Clinton.”

Rev. Moon is another media mogul whose publications have backed Bush and Republicans while attacking Democrats, including printing an accusation in 2000 that Gore was “delusional.”

Given the conservative bias among senior news executives, lower-level editorial employees also understand that critical articles about Bush and other favored Republicans carry extra risk.

By the late 1970s, the cumulative impact of those three examples of “liberal bias” – the battle against segregation, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal – became the catalyst for an extraordinary historical reaction. Conservatives, led by former Treasury Secretary William Simon and financed by major conservative foundations, began investing first tens of millions of dollars and later billions of dollars in building their own media, think tanks and attack groups. [For a brief history of the modern conservative media machine, see Consortiumnews.com's "Democrats' Dilemma."]

[For details on the disparity in coverage [of Bush and Gore in the 2000 election], see Consortiumnews.com's "Protecting Bush-Cheney."]

Ironically, the Bush campaign had been geared up, prior to the election, for the potential of an opposite result, with Bush winning the popular vote and trailing in the Electoral College. In that case, Bush aides planned to activate the conservative media, especially talk radio, to challenge Gore’s legitimacy and demand that Bush be accepted as the people’s president. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The GOP's Popular-Vote Hypocrisy."]

Gore was blamed for an effort to exclude military absentee ballots, though months later it was disclosed that the Bush forces had engineered a two-tier approach, letting questionable military absentee ballots be counted in predominately Republican counties and excluding them in heavily Democratic counties, where many black voters resided. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com "The Media Is the Mess."]

With Bush installed in the White House, after five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a state-court-ordered recount, the national media rallied around him again, apparently out of concern that his fragile claim to legitimacy might undermine American prestige in the world. In marked contrast to the harsh reporting that confronted Clinton even before he was sworn in, the national news media treated Bush with kid gloves.

That deference deepened after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, eight months into his presidency. The media held off on any searing examination of Bush’s failure to recognize the growing danger from al Qaeda terrorists despite warnings that his incoming administration had received from Clinton’s national security aides. As the dangers had mounted and missed signals accumulated in summer 2001, Bush retreated to his Texas ranch for a month-long vacation.

Rather than meting out tough criticism, the national media couldn't get enough of Bush's decisive leadership and his skill as a wartime president. Again, the press corps seemed worried that critical coverage would undermine the U.S. government at a time of crisis and might open the press corps to the old charge of "liberal bias."

In this post-Sept. 11 climate, leading news organizations chose to play down the most dramatic finding of their own recount of Florida’s ballots – that Al Gore won Florida regardless of what standard of chad was used, whether dimpled, perforated or fully punched through. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White House.”]

After Gore announced that he would not seek the Democratic nomination, some media executives began acknowledging the obvious: that the national press corps had operated with a deep-seated bias against Gore.

“Somewhere along the line,” said Mark Halperin, ABC’s political director, “the dominant political reporters for most dominant news organizations decided they didn’t like him, and they thought the story line on any given day was about his being a phony or a liar or a waffler. Within the subculture of political reporting, there was almost peer pressure not to say something neutral, let alone nice, about his ideas, his political skills, his motivations.” [Washington Post, Dec. 23, 2002]

For Democrats and liberals,... the political message should be clear: only by countering the powerful conservative media machine can they hope to change this dynamic. There is no reason to believe that simply complaining about the situation will do much to alter the behavior of the national press corps.

On the other hand, for Republicans and conservatives, the secret to their continued success will be, in part, to keep the “myth of the liberal media” alive.