I was struck by an election night panel I saw on CNN last night (3/6/12). “Contributors here on the left and the right,” as host Anderson Cooper told viewers.
On the right: former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer and right-wing blogger Erick Erickson.
On the left? Frequent TV pundit and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and… Hilary Rosen.
Who?
Rosen might be best known for her years at the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry’s lobbying powerhouse.
She briefly held the title of Washington editor-at-large for the Huffington Post. But the site cut ties with her in 2010 because she had taken on a gig as a consultant for the oil company BP. You might recall they were in the news at the time, having spilled several million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
She is apparently still the Managing Partner at the Brunswick Group, “an international corporate communications partnership that helps businesses and other organizations address critical communications challenges.” Brunswick has a range of corporate clients–including major banks, energy companies, mining companies and so on.
Doing PR for corporations…but “from the left.”
I guess you always have to ask, from the left of what?
If you push a table up against the right wall, anything on the other side can be deemed “on the left”.
And the acceptable political spectrum in the US, as adjudicated by the corpress, has a lot of empty floor space on the left side of its digs, doesn’t it?
Maybe it is time to stop going along with that useless lingo “left” and “right”
…more like “left” and “right” fists of the same corporate rule/party -they both need to go!
(it is long-overdue that we move on from the 2-pronged corporate party to a non-corporate party where corporate servants need not apply)…
OK, fair enough, but that point about CNN’s absurd attempt to equate “left” with its hired stooges from the corporate side was made twenty years ago about Michael Kinsley. Why would anybody with a functioning brain have watched CNN since, except to find more evidence for the apocalypse?
To try to invigorate this no-brainer, may I ask how FAIR itself would qualify itself as “left”? Please answer me, please, I beg of you o employed watchdogs of the alleged left, who most likely are not doing that well financially for me to worry over, but this is a friend talking. FAIR accepts all sorts of corporate funding, just like Ms. Rosen, correct? FAIR’s staff drives cars, which use oil, correct? FAIR champions this fiction of the First Amendment, which (both the fiction and the hoary words) gives good cover to the corporations’ relentless accumulation of social power, correct? FAIR punjab Jeff Cohen gave the corporate predator/behemoth Google the biggest slurp-job I have ever clicked on, so was that “left”?
I think FAIR needs to let its commenters take over the offices for a year.
If it hasn’t occurred to you dolts, this is their way of re-defining what “Left” is so that they can say, by ‘definition’ that they sponsor “Both sides” of the debate. Yes, I know you aren’t dolts…its obvious.
@Keith
Just because its obvious doesn’t mean its not worth reporting…
There is no Left. At best some political movements could be called Central. As long as Capitalism is in play and the movement is top down, it is on the Right, anti Democratic and after your rights and wallet.
The “Mommy wars” and media manipulation in the US election:
In place of any discussion of the real issues of concern to the vast majority of Americans—unemployment, declining living standards, cuts in social programs, militarism and war—the Democrats and Republicans prefer to accentuate their differences on so-called “social” issues of greater or lesser importance, all of which, however, are secondary to the basic questions of class exploitation and the growth of social and economic inequality.
Rosen herself personifies the upper-middle class social layer that is the main social base of the Democratic Party. During her lucrative tenure as chief executive of the RIAA, from 1998 to 2003, she spearheaded the music industry’s effort to close down the music-sharing site Napster and strengthen enforcement of copyright laws.
Rosen herself personifies the upper-middle class social layer that is the main social base of the Democratic Party. During her lucrative tenure as chief executive of the RIAA, from 1998 to 2003, she spearheaded the music industry’s effort to close down the music-sharing site Napster and strengthen enforcement of copyright laws.
http://wsws.org/articles/2012/apr2012/rose-a14.shtml