WHAT Liberal Media?

I keep hearing references to the "liberal media" or the "ultra-liberal press" and I wonder who they are talking about. Do they mean the chain of papers founded by that famous "liberal" William Randolph Hearst? Or maybe the chain of papers owned by Dan Quayle's parents? With the exception of the "Weekly Worker" and a few others, most newspapers are owned by rich people, and the rich tend to be pretty conservative. One of the distinguishing characteristics of conservatives is that they are generally intolerant of any ideas that differ from their own. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to hold that people have a right to their own opinions, even if we don't particularly agree.

The view of the media (both print and film) as "liberal" appears to have begun with McCarthyism and the Communist paranoia of the 50's. Anyone who dared oppose Senator Joe and his fellow inquisitors was immediately branded a "Communist sympathizer" and found himself (or herself) being investigated, harassed, blacklisted and assassinated by innuendo. When the press started to question the excesses of these witch hunts, they, too, were branded. The attitude seems to have stuck, at least in the minds of many conservatives.

Prior to the Vietnam war, the press pretty much accepted as gospel anything the government said. Oh sure, there were editorials deflating particular politicians, but major decisions weren't questioned. It wasn't until CIA staffer Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers (a Rand Corporation study of the history of the Vietnam war, commissioned by the Pentagon) to the press that they really started to question what had been going on.

It seems that the Vietnamese simply wanted their country back from the French and were willing to fight for it. They had asked for our help in 1948, thinking that since we have always declared ourselves to be the defenders of democracy, we would help them. They even modeled their declaration of independence on ours. They were wrong. We felt we owed more allegiance to our allies, the French, than to a third-world people struggling to escape from colonial rule.

It turned out that our own government had been lying to us in a major way. And once that log had been rolled over, all kinds of bugs started crawling out. We found that counts of "Viet Cong killed" often included anyone who happened to be in the village. After all, any of them could be Viet Cong. We found that "pacifying" a village meant destroying it. And the counts of our own fatalities often stopped when we ran out of body bags. Couldn't let the folks back home get discouraged about the war, now, could we? But it was hard to ignore the footage of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest.

Then Watergate hit. A couple of reporters got a tip that there was more to this little break-in than met the eye, and started to dig. They uncovered a network of espionage, sabotage and coverup that extended all the way to the President himself. Were they "attacking" the President? When the press uncovers evidence of welfare fraud, do the conservatives accuse them of "attacking" people on welfare?

Was it "liberal" of the press to report all this? In the sense that the press was recognizing and reporting on beliefs and opinions that differed from this country's party line, I guess maybe it was. I think it was just doing its job.

So the next time you hear someone complain about the "liberal media," remember that the first thing a totalitarian government does is to suppress the expression of any differing opinions by shutting down the free press. Just salute and say "Seig Heil!"

Email me at "me@gordon-glasgow.org"