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If we had a liberal media then it would look more like what this article from Alter.net describes. Fact check time. Are you seeing these types of stores in the bright vivid technicolour everyday, endlessly repeated so people know about them? Of course not, they what a liberal media would *actively promote*. What do we see? Sensationalism, sports and weather; the dross that is cheap to produce and perpetuates the status quo.
I’ve copy/pasted the first seven points, go to article itself to read the last eight and the conclusion.
If you know anyone who still believes in a “liberal media,” here’s 15 things everyone would know if there really were a “liberal media” (inspired by Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post):
1. Where the jobs went.
Outsourcing (or offshoring) is a bigger contributor to unemployment in the U.S. than laziness.
Since 2000, U.S. multinationals have cut 2.9 million jobs here while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg as multinational corporations account for only about 20 percent of the labor force.
When was the last time you saw a front-page headline about outsourcing?
Source: Wall Street Journal via Think Progress.
2. Upward wealth redistribution and/or inequality.
In 2010, 20 percent of the people held approximately 88 percent of the net worth in the U.S. The top one percent alone held 35 percent of all net worth.
The bottom 80 percent of people held only 12 percent of net worth in 2010. In 1983, the bottom 80 percent held 18 percent of net worth.
These statistics are not Democrat or Republican. They are widely available to reporters. Why aren’t they discussed in the “liberal” media?
Source: Occupy Posters
3. ALEC.
If there was a corporate organization that drafted laws and then passed them on to legislators to implement, wouldn’t you think the “liberal” media would report on them?
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is such an organization. Need legislation drafted? No need to go through a lobbyist to reach state legislatures anymore. Just contact ALEC. Among other things, ALEC is responsible for:
- Stand Your Ground laws
- Voter ID laws
- Right to Work laws
- Privatizing schools
- Health savings account bills which benefit health care companies
- Tobacco industry legislation
Many legislators don’t even change the proposals handed to them by this group of corporations. They simply take the corporate bills and bring them to the legislative floor.
This is the primary reason for so much similar bad legislation in different states.
Hello … “liberal media” … over here!
They’re meeting in Chicago this weekend. Maybe the “liberal media” will send some reporters.
4. The number of people in prison.
Which country in the world has the most people in prison?
You might think it would be China (with more than one billion people and a restrictive government) or former Soviets still imprisoned in Russia.
Wrong. The United States has the most people in prison by far of any country in the world. With 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners – 2.3 million criminals. China with a population 4 times our size is second with 1.6 million people in prison.
In 1972, 350,000 Americans were in imprisoned. In 2010, this number had grown to 2.3 million. Yet from 1988 – 2008, crime rates have declined by 25 percent.
Isn’t anyone in the liberal media interested in why so many people are in prison when crime has dropped? WTF “liberal media”?
Source: Wikipedia/Justice Policy Institute Report.
5. The number of black people in prison.
In 2009, non-Hispanic blacks, while only 13.6 percent of the population, accounted for 39.4 percent of the total prison and jail population.
In 2011, according to FBI statistics, whites accounted for 69.2 percent of arrests.
Numbers like these suggest a racial bias in our justice system.
To me, this is a much bigger story than any single incident like Travyon Martin. Or, at the very least, why didn’t the “liberal media” ever mention this while covering the Martin story?
6. U.S. health care costs are the highest in the world.
The expenditure per person in the U.S. is $8,233. Norway is second with $5,388.
Total amount of GDP spent on health care is also the highest of any country in the world at 17.6 percent. The next closest country is the Netherlands at 12 percent.
As a liberal, I’d like to ask why the market isn’t bringing down costs. I’d think a “liberal” media might too.
7. Glass-Steagall.
Glass-Steagall separated risky financial investments from government backed deposits for 66 years.
The idea is simple. Banks were prohibited from using your federally insured savings to make risky investments.
Why is this a good idea?
Risky investments should be risky. If banks can use federally insured funds, there is no risk to them. If they win, they win. If they lose, we cover the cost.
Elizabeth Warren did a great job explaining this to the “liberal news” desk at CNBC.
The Western press is/was conspicuously quiet when Hugo Chavez died. Our press is always mute when it comes to giving attention to official enemies or other successful political systems. Here is an excerpt from Alter.net about Chavez and some of his achievements.
“The regional blocs he worked to create fostered south-to-south economic and political alliances, provided a check to US military power in the region, and encouraged the leftist politics and economic policies of presidents across Latin America.
Beyond this regional influence, some of Chávez’s greatest legacies are not in the presidential palace, but in the streets, factories and neighborhoods of Venezuela, among the activists, workers and neighbors who have built the Bolivarian Revolution from the bottom up.
From communal councils to worker-run factories, Venezuela is the site of the some of the most sophisticated and successful experiments in direct democracy, socialism and worker-control in the world. While Chávez was a key figure in the development of many of these projects and initiatives, it is the Venezuelan people that brought them to life and will keep them alive after his death. Many of these programs are characterized not by top-down, bureaucratic state policies, or government funding handed out to create electoral support. They are the projects of people using the Bolivarian Revolution as a grassroots tool.
Since taking office in 1999 Chávez used his mandate as a leader, and the nation’s oil wealth, to create programs that provide free education, dental and health clinics, land and housing reform, government-subsidized supermarkets, and hundreds of thousands of business cooperatives. In Venezuela, where much of the population lives below the poverty line, these programs have had an enormous impact. Other government initiatives have helped spur on activism from below, self-governance at a local level, and direct democracy in political decision-making and funding.”
I recommend reading the full article.
Meaningful discourse requires a mutually accepted set of shared definitions to start. Otherwise the parties involved will unerringly talk past each other and misconstrue what the other is saying. George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist, has mapped this procedure brilliantly in several books ( The Political Mind being the most concise).
I digress.
The excerpt that I’m sharing with you today is from an Alter.net article entitled “The Political Awakening of a Republican: ‘I Had Viewed Whole Swaths of the Country and the World as Second-Class People’.” When you go there and read the rest watch carefully as the author of the piece first has to question his cognitive framework, struggle with it and eventually reject it for being at odds with reality. His epiphany reminds me of the saying, “reality has a liberal bias,” more than a saying because it is a factual statement and one that resonates with me. You can go with god if you’d like, enjoy the trip; I’ll be here in reality waiting once you get back.
We’ll pick up the article as the author has his first breakthrough in discovering that his reality is not everyone’s reality.
“Then something tiny happened that pried open my eyes to the less obvious forms of racism and the hurdles the poor face when they try to climb the economic ladder. It happened on an official visit to a school in a suburb of New Orleans that served kids who had gotten kicked out of every other school around. I was investigating what types of services were available to the young people who were showing up in juvenile hall and seemed to be headed toward the proverbial life of crime.
My tour guide mentioned that parents were required to participate in some school programs. One of these was a field trip to a sit-down restaurant.
This stopped me in my tracks. I thought: What kind of a lame field trip is that?
It turned out that none of the families had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before. The teachers had to instruct parents and students alike how to order off a menu, how to calculate the tip.
I was stunned.
Starting To See
That night, I told my roommates about the crazy thing I had heard that day. Apparently there were people out there who had never been to something as basic as a real restaurant. Who knew?
One of my roommates wasn’t surprised. He worked at a local bank branch that required two forms of ID to open an account. Lots of people came in who had only one or none at all.
I was flooded with questions: There are adults who have no ID? And no bank accounts? Who are these people? How do they vote? How do they live? Is there an entire off-the-grid alternate universe out there?
From then on, I started to notice a lot more reality. I noticed that the criminal justice system treats minorities differently in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, and that many of the people who were getting swept up by the system came from this underclass that I knew so little about. Lingering for months in lock-up for misdemeanors, getting pressed against the hood and frisked during routine traffic stops, being pulled over in white neighborhoods for “driving while black”: these are things that never happen to people in my world. Not having experienced it, I had always assumed that government force was only used against guilty people. (Maybe that’s why we middle-class white people collectively freak out at TSA airport pat-downs.)
I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on. It turned out that everything I was “discovering” had been hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighborhood redlining, the “trial tax,” the “poverty tax,” and on and on. Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts.
Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual responsibility”? That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes” make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed. But I had assumed that bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself promoted from junior varsity to varsity. It turns out that it’s more like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series. Sure, some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the Olympians.
The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets. Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted — from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.”
The long winter in Canada and the United States is going to challenge the OWS movement. Living in a tent sucks at the best of times, but add snow and cold temperatures to the mix and the proposition becomes quite untenable (at least to my delicate tastes). I hope that the organizers of the OWS have planned for the elements, perhaps moving the focus south during the winter and then coming back in force in the north during the spring. Whatever their plans may be, I hope no one is injured due to exposure to the elements.
The weather aside, another feature playing prominently into the future of the OWS movement is its apparent resilience to the corrosive effects of the right wing media. Quite simply, it would seem the OWS seem to have resisted so for being tarred and feathered by its main ideological opponents.
“Hardline conservatives struggle to find a candidate to go up against Barack Obama in 2012. Sarah Palin gets booed in public. Tea Party numbers are dwindling and now the group is ranking amongst the least popular groups in the country. Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street has surged forward both in public consciousness and in popularity. The right-wing response to Occupy Wall St. has been limp and incoherent, mainly centered around spreading urban legends about dirty hippies and avoiding any substantive engagement.
How did the right-wing lose hold of the narrative? Here are four reasons it has been unsuccessful (so far) in steering and reframing the discourse surrounding OWS and the movement’s focus on the injustice of the 1%’s dominance of our economy and politics.”
The focus away from the mostly incoherent babble from the Tea Party is a good thing. The sheer amount of stupidity amalgamated into one movement was dangerous for the political discourse of the US, polarizing even further the divide between people.
1. Its “woe is me” pose may have lost luster in an ongoing economic crisis.
“The stock and trade of the American right is to play the victim. Right-wing propaganda in the form of Fox News, talk radio and direct mail is full of whining about how conservatives are just so oppressed because they can’t impose their agenda on others by fiat. The Tea Party’s motto was one of victimization: “I want my country back!” At first, many perceived the Tea Party as a populist uprising against unpopular initiatives like the bank bailout. As time has worn on, however, it’s become clear that the Tea Party has no real interest in holding corporations accountable, and that its leadership generally seemed interested in exploiting the bank bailout as part of a larger anti-government ideology coupled with a heartfelt devotion to the typical culture warrior nonsense.”
The persecution experience of the majority plays out on many levels. Encountering this juxtaposition while arguing with people is most distressing as it shows the extreme inversion of values that has taken place that have mostly swept reasonable debate away.
2. The obsession with sex.
“The Republicans swept many state elections and the U.S. House by convincing the voters that they intended to do something about the economic crisis and lower the unemployment rate. Instead, they devoted most of their attention to the supposed crisis of people having unauthorized orgasms. The House can’t pass a jobs bill to save their lives, but they can pass one bill after another attacking abortion rights or defunding family planning spending. The first big showdown between Obama and the House Republicans, in fact, was over condoms and the pill; House Republicans threatened to shut down the federal government in order to prevent American women from getting subsidized birth control pills from Planned Parenthood. On the state level, voters saw the newly elected Republicans do the same thing. One state after another is falling into disrepair and seeing unemployment numbers stay high, but their state legislatures are more interested in defunding contraception and restricting abortion than in paying attention to people’s economic concerns.”
I though “the plan” for Republicans was to promise social conservative reform to get elected, and then once elected deliver right of centre economic policy while ignoring their social promises. It would seem rather than following the plan they’ve actually dug their heels in and decided to make the social agenda a sticking point. Apparently no one has told them that the items they are supporting are regressive anti-woman measures that seemed designed to take the US back to the Dark Ages.
3. The looniness.
“Between the Tea Party and the electoral sweeps, the right seemed to decide that it was popular enough that it could let it all hang out without getting any blowback. The American right has always been loony and paranoid, but 2011 was when the looniness really came out and became unavoidable. There were Glenn Beck’s paranoid rantings. So many right wingers became loudly fixated on President Obama’s birth story that he was eventually forced to release his birth certificate. Republican presidential candidates find they must pay tribute to all sorts of irrational nonsense, from denying global warming to creationism, in order just to get their foot in the door. Average Americans have come to expect that we’ll be hearing about communist mind control chemicals in the drinking water soon. It’s hard to see the Tea Party as rational actors who can make solid economic decisions when they spend so much time emailing each other with lists of reasons they think President Obama was born in Kenya.”
Not much to add here, other than to highlight the sad commitment to delusional nonsense.
4. The out-of-sync ideological preoccupations.
“Beyond the obviously loony right-wing nonsense is the inability to set aside unpopular preoccupations. The right assumed the electoral sweeps meant the country was ready to hear ideas the far right has been nursing for a long time in the underground. Right-wingers talked bank bailouts until they got into power and then switched to talking about permanently eliminating major taxes on the super-wealthy, ending Social Security and privatizing popular government services–all ideas that don’t sit well with the public at large. On the contrary, in economic hard times, Americans hang on harder to social welfare programs like Social Security, and they stop thinking it’s so great that rich people have more money than they know what to do with while people are starving in the streets.
Because of these ideological preoccupations and wealth-worshipping, the American right was wholly unequipped to deal with the rise of liberal protests in the form of Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent. The protesters have addressed record unemployment, the foreclosure crisis and growing inequalities between the wealthy and the rest of us; hence the reference to the 1 percent of Americans who control 40 percent of our nation’s wealth. The right couldn’t even grasp the actual complaints of the protesters and instead responded with We Are the 53 Percent, a reference to the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income tax. The problem with that is no one was talking about most federal income tax payers; the liberal protesters are defending the vast majority of Americans, a group that includes people currently paying federal income tax, and those who can’t because they’re poor or students or retired.
The whole point of Occupy Wall Street is that a middle-class person who struggles to get by has more in common with an unemployed person than with the rich; in fact, a middle-class person could easily become a poor person in this economy. That is untrue of the 1 percent. The utter inability to grasp that basic argument has exposed the American right for what it is: a group of intellectually bereft people whose reliance on empty ideological platitudes prevents them from engaging with a changing world.”
UsneakydevilU gets the Fail Award for Lack of Argumentative Prowess.
I’ve highlighted the author’s assertion because it seems many discussions get sidetracked when it comes to discussing what the OWS protests are about. More importantly though, what I find most disturbing about debating with many people who self identify as holding right wing opinion is the lack of commitment to grounding there presuppositions in fact. Consider the response garnered from my last attempt at discussing educational issues with a religious conservative blogger. After thoroughly dissecting and refuting his arguments the responses offered in return were sadly bereft of any substantive counter arguments.
Nothing.
No content, no assertions, just assorted whinging about tone and how angry atheists are and how not having a skydaddy is bad for me. Admittedly, the format chosen by me was very critical (what else can you be when confronted with nuclear grade stupidity?) but not insulting to the person in question, just their argumentation. How do you grow as a person if you cannot interact reasonably with ideas that conflict with your own? The alter.net article struck a chord with me as it seemed to mirror my experiences while debating a ‘conservative’ from the US.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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