Conservative Media and the Propaganda Push

American media is dominated by conservatives. The majority of news outlets are owned by the conglomerates Disney, CBS, TimeWarner, General Electric, and of course Rupert Murdoc's 'News Corporation', the most extreme example. The only voices in the public media are from the mouths of those who can afford it. Unless you're rich enough to pay the price, you can't have the ear of the public which, of course, leads to ideas that benefit only the wealthy (trickle down economics is the most biting example, being a philosophy that literally consists of giving more money to the wealthy and nothing else). This, of course, passes onto thier political donations. Rupert Murdoc donates massive amounts of money to the Republican party as does Richard Parsons, CEO of Time-Warner.

Fox News is the most striking example of extreme conservative bias. They often lie to their audience and cover their legal liability by adding a question mark at the end. I know it's not a news outlet, but watch this segment from the Daily Show. If you like, turn the sound off and just watch the Fox footage. It's pretty telling.

The website http://www.fair.org is for the organization "Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting". They had a really great article up written by John K. Wilson called "The Myth of Pro-Obama Media Bias". It reports that Obama has, in fact, received more coverage but the coverage has been very negatively stilted. Contrariwise, McCain's coverage has avoided the same type of negative coverage (the example Mr. Wilson gives are many, this being one of them; "Obama’s distant acquaintance with Bill Ayers (whose role in the 1960s’ Weather Underground Obama has condemned) became the basis of absurd accusations of “terrorist” connections, while the press ignored McCain’s trumpeting the endorsement of Oliver North, whose Iranian-financed Contra war killed far more innocents than ’60s radicals ever did.") Addionally, the disparity in media coverage has been shown in the past to be fairly non-partisan ("Measuring the first six months of each election year, Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis got only 32 percent of the coverage garnered by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988; incumbent Bill Clinton got only 28 percent of the coverage Republican challenger Bob Dole got in 1996. Incumbent George W. Bush got 85 percent as much coverage as Democratic Sen. John Kerry in 2004—the closest thing to parity in early campaign coverage since Tyndall has been keeping track.").

Why, then, do we constantly hear about the media's radical left-wing tendancies and their extreme liberal bias? Well, my guess would be that you hear it because the actual media (not this nonexistant straw-media that's been fabricated as a dummy to easily attack) creates and propagates the myth.

I'll leave you with just a few of the screenshots of extreme-right bias in Fox News. This took about 5 minutes of Googling to find, by the way;