{"id":1225,"date":"2004-07-30T16:43:41","date_gmt":"2004-07-30T20:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/000af36.netsolhost.com\/wordpress1\/2004\/07\/30\/cnn_liberal_net\/"},"modified":"2004-07-30T16:43:41","modified_gmt":"2004-07-30T20:43:41","slug":"cnn_liberal_net","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/2004\/07\/30\/cnn_liberal_net\/","title":{"rendered":"CNN: Liberal Network No More"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Columbia Journalism Reviews Campaign Desk has an item today<\/a> about CNN, which has often been portrayed by conservatives as a liberal network. In fact, conservatives describe any media that isn\u2019t right-wing as liberal. In their lexicon, there\u2019s no such thing as moderate or objective news reporting. If you\u2019re not conservative, you\u2019re liberal.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s bad enough when describing voters and politicians, but for a profession that\u2019s supposed to be fair, balanced, accurate and objective, it\u2019s an absurd dichotomy.<\/p>\n

During the Democratic convention, I watched mostly CNN and MSNBC, with a little PBS and no Fox. After four nights, I could no longer tolerate Chris Matthews on MSNBC, a guy I had once turned off and then began watching occasionally. But his shouting and stepping on people\u2019s comments revealed not just a conservative slant but a bore who bullies people, even his own guest pundits. His style was contagious during the convention, infecting Andrea Mitchell, Howard Fineman, Willie Brown and Joe Scarborough (himself a bruiser). They constantly talked over one another to the point that you couldn\u2019t tell what was said half the time.<\/p>\n

CNN with Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenberg at least had a lower volume. But as the CJR piece points out, they, along with CNN\u2019s Anderson Cooper and others, revealed if not a conservative tilt, an unprofessional refusal to challenge pundits on their talking points. I had pointed out two misrepresentations yesterday, and the CJR writer later in the day mentioned them on his post.<\/p>\n

CNN also did something the other networks didn\u2019t. Immediately after Edwards\u2019s and Kerry\u2019s speeches, CNN brought in representatives of the Bush campaign to counter the speech. Edwards drew Ralph Reed and Kerry\u2019s antagonist was Ed Gillespie of the RNC. In both cases, Blitzer, who has never struck me as more than a not-so-pretty-face-but-a-perfectly-trimmed beard of an anchor, and Woodruff and Greenberg, for whom I have had respect, never challenged the GOP on their talking points.<\/p>\n

But in all the coverage, the media\u2019s obsession with the talking points dominates. Flip-flopping is one. IN a Lexis-Nexis search, I found more than 80 newspaper articles that mention the term over the past week. Forty-nine magazine articles used it over the past six months. And on the tube every major network \u2013 from Fox to NPR, CNN to PBS, MSNBC to CNBC repeated the charge.<\/p>\n

One could argue that they should because people are thinking that way about Kerry. But the only reason they are is because the GOP has constantly promoted it. Even his most notorious flip \u2013 his not vote for $87 billion for the Iraq War was clearly at the time described as a vote of protest against the Bush administration\u2019s refusal to curtail tax breaks to pay for the war. It was a fiscally responsible vote to take. Remember, Bush could have reduced the amount requested or reduced the tax cuts to address those issues. But he didn\u2019t knowing most lawmakers wouldn\u2019t oppose it because they were afraid of the exact charges the Bush campaign now makes. So instead of calling Bush on his political ploy, the media \u2013 and with relish CNN \u2013 constantly regurgitates the point.<\/p>\n

This proves the thesis of many writers, including Eric Alterman, Joe Conason, Al Franken and others: The way to intimidate the media is to accuse it of being liberal. The defendant then will bend over backwards to prove you wrong \u2013 by being an attack dog for the right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Columbia Journalism Reviews Campaign Desk has an item today about CNN, which has often been portrayed by conservatives as a liberal network. In fact, conservatives describe any media that isn\u2019t right-wing as liberal. In their lexicon, there\u2019s no such thing as moderate or objective news reporting. If you\u2019re not conservative, you\u2019re liberal. That\u2019s bad… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}