Following the 1992 GOP convention, FAIR’s magazine Extra! (11/92) highlighted remarks made by Rich Bond in which the then-Republican national chair explained the strategy behind the right’s relentless charges of liberal media bias:
There’s some strategy to it. I’m the coach of a kids’ basketball team and Little League Teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is “work the refs.” Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.
In a recent appearance on MSNBC‘s Hardball With Chris Matthews (10/19/09), Pat Buchanan gave a first-hand account of how the strategy paid off for him and at least one other member of the Nixon administration:
BUCHANAN: I know when we hit the New York Times, for example, in the ’60s, all of a sudden, they blossomed with an op-ed page that had some conservatives on it and conservative voices there, and all the other newspapers did, as well.
MATTHEWS: That’s how you got Bill his job. Is that how you got Bill Safire his job?
[LAUGHTER]
BUCHANAN: Well, listen, they went out looking for conservative–that’s how I got my job! Create a vacuum out there and a real demand, you’ve got to put these people on, Chris, and go to work and….
Like Bond, Buchanan acknowledges that the ploy is disingenuous: In a Los Angeles Times interview (3/14/96) during his 1996 campaign for president, Buchanan praised the media for fairness: “I’ve gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage…. For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on Earth does that.”
And of course it helps that the corporate media is acutely sensitive to charges of liberal bias–regardless of whether they are true or not.
Does this story have a point?
Yeah, the point is that charges of liberal media bias are spurious.
During the Bush administration there was a conservative media bias, and few democrats were allowed interviews with the administration.Helen Thomas comes to mind.Is Fox Network a reputable News network or just an arm of the Republikan propaganda apparatus?
During the Nixon Administration days, Bill Safire and Pat Buchanan conducted a campaign of sustained denunciation that had little in common with the Obama critique of the far-right Fox News. Fox has been Far Right, anti-Democratic Party long before Obama was elected.
Some form of the Fairness Doctrine should be revived that, like the original doctrine, authorizes the station licensee to determine if “all sides are heard on a controversial issue of public importance.”–mk
The MSM never has been liberal – it’s a fallacy invented and perpetrated by right-wingers. To the right wing, liberal media is that which reports the whole truth, despite how it makes some politicians look. And “fair and balanced” to them means putting forth opposing views to absolutely everything Democrats suggest, most often even if there is no valid “opposing view” — the more outrageous the “opposing view” they put out, and the louder the big mouth stating it, the higher their TV ratings go. It’s all entertainment to too many viewers.
“””BUCHANAN: I know when we hit the New York Times, for example, in the ’60s, all of a sudden, they blossomed with an op-ed page that had some conservatives on it and conservative voices there, and all the other newspapers did, as well.”””
I wonder how that differs from the Obama Whitehouse “hitting” the Fux Gnus channel? Or in what way various “actual” news organizations handle it.