New Report Exposes Media Love Affair with Right-Wingers and the Fox News Worldview: ‘Reporters Can’t Get Enough’
AlterNet / By Joshua Holland
The Right’s messaging isn’t confined to the conservative media.
December 25, 2010 |
Forget about fake moon landings and Obama’s birth certificate. The most enduring unfounded conspiracy theory in America is that our institutions of knowledge – the media, the academy and even science — are biased in favor of liberals.
The national media is based in large urban centers, so it should come as no surprise that conservatives would rarely see their views on strictly social issues well represented. But on matters of substance, we are talking about a corporate-owned media that pushes relentlessly for “free trade” deals, foreign wars and fiscal “austerity.”
In my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, I discuss how, beginning in the early 1970s, a number of wealthy conservative donors have invested in the development of what I call a parallel “intellectual infrastructure,” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.
But the Right’s messaging isn’t confined to the conservative media, in part because of the relentless pressure on newsrooms from conservative activists – it’s an example of “working the refs.”
