Why Liberals Don’t Stand a Chance in the Corporate Media
Last March, when President Obama announced he was fast-tracking a bunch of deepwater oil leases, mainstream media commentators told us what a politically sophisticated move it was. He was showing the “courage” to defy his base among the anti-drilling crowd and when those dolphin-huggers screamed foul, he stood his ground. A few weeks later, when the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo oil disaster demonstrated how ecologically devastating this type of drilling can be, Obama’s previous pandering to Big Oil didn’t look so brilliant after all. The environmentalists among the Democratic base were right, the corporate media talking heads (and Obama) were wrong.
The president is fond of telling us that for real “change” to take place he needs to be pushed. People need to be organized and mobilized and move him in the direction they want him to go. He can’t “do it alone,” he says. But the environmentalists who opposed expanding deepwater drilling tried to heed his call and were brushed off like so many dandruff flakes. So were the people who tried to tell him that escalating the war in Afghanistan was a mistake. Maybe it will take a progressive challenger in the 2012 Democratic primaries to give Obama the push he’s longing for?
Commentators like the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald F. Seib, who penned an article a year ago titled “Irked Extremes May Mean a Happy Middle,” welcome any evidence that Obama is willing to forsake his base as a welcome dose of Realpolitik. The more “the professional Left” complains, the better. In Washington-speak it’s just assumed that the path to political success lies in Obama’s willingness to beat up the people who put him in office.
The corporate media reinforce this trope constantly. Unfortunately, MSNBC’s liberal news and commentary line-up, which is the best thing going for the Democrats right now in the television ether, presents a disjointed ideological message, like hosting a vegetarian cooking show while your sponsors run commercials for steak, pork, and veal.
http://www.laprogressive.com/corporate-media-liberals/
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and nobody is sure who can do a better job, if they even can do a better job ...
