|
By Brent Bozell
Media Research Center
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 25, 2005 — The
radical left is not enjoying the 21st century, yearning instead for a
perpetual rerun of the 1970s, with America whipped by Vietnam, and the
planet in thrall to Third World "liberation" ideologies and theologies.
Ah, the '70s, where the greatest enemy of all mankind was not the
Soviet empire, but the Multinational Corporation.
Instead, the world is now embracing Western-style democratic
capitalism. Worse yet, the national media conversation isn't the
completely one-sided left-wing nightly harangue that it was in that
bygone era. Even PBS and NPR seem far too cautious and corporate for
the radicals now. They sense a "creeping conservative coup" threatening
public broadcasting, their own little People's Republic.
They want a media that focuses public attention on their agenda:
protest capitalism as a death trap, resist the evil military-industrial
complex, lobby for massive redistribution of wealth, and You Shall Have
No Gods Before Mother Earth. They aren’t liberals. They are
radicals.
With those goals in mind, in mid-May, the radicals held a confab called the "National Conference for Media Reform"
in St. Louis. Many of the speakers at this hard-left hootenanny had
trouble containing their extreme disdain for America. Start with the
shocking remarks of Linda Foley, the President of the Newspaper Guild,
the union representing reporters at newspapers. She was upset that
"there's not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the
cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists
in Iraq." She charged
that the U.S. military "target and kill journalists from other
countries, particularly Arab countries" and, in the case of Al-Jazeera,
"they actually target them and blow up their studios with impunity."
The guild's switchboard was loaded with outraged calls. How dare this
woman suggest our sons and daughters are assigned by their commanders
to shoot journalists instead of engage the enemy. When asked by Editor
& Publisher magazine whether she could have put it differently, Foley replied:
"I was careful of not saying troops, I said U.S. military." Bill
Clinton would be proud of that defense. And she was hailed by the left.
The blog "Daily Kos" called Foley "a courageous and, consequently, dangerous, example of what's right."
Ironically, the keynote speaker for the anti-capitalist confab was PBS
omnipresence Bill Moyers, who squeezed a personal fortune out of PBS
Home Video and expensive book spinoffs of his pompous TV work. Moyers
devoted his Castro-length address to attacking the threatening presence
of Ken Tomlinson, who has done the dastardly deed of documenting the
dramatic liberal biases of the old Moyers show "Now."
Earth to PBS: when you are under attack for being a nest of
left-wingers, it might not be the best strategy to let your most
identifiable left-wing stars go to radical-left conferences and attack
conservatives as evil. That tends to exacerbate your image problem, see.
Moyers announced that the definition of objectivity should be turned
upside down for PBS: "Objectivity was not satisfied by two opposing
people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the
difference. I came to believe that objective journalism means
describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and
fantasies, as well as the big lie of people in power."
You can practically smell the gunpowder in that loaded statement. But to Moyers – it's objectivity.
Then Moyers grew sillier. He said that under the Bush administration
and the corporate media, Americans were growing into "an unconscious
people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information
and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese
in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda." Let the giggles
flow as we ponder how Moyers ever meant to fix this spirit by making
shows like "Now," where the vast majority of his segments offered no
troublesome disagreements with his personal orthodoxy. Or consider his
PBS documentary "Trade Secrets" bashing the chemical industry, which
included only one solitary point of view: that of Moyers, the media
monopoly unto himself.
Critics on the right are portrayed as evil for merely demanding that
somebody in this tax-funded public broadcasting maze ensures that the
system fulfills its legal mandate of objectivity and balance. The
radical left arrogantly demands an "independent" news media that
screams with one voice, with one mind, and with one bleeding heart,
that conservatism equals war, torture, environmental poisoning,
starving the poor, and squelching free speech. The radical left finds
balance unacceptable, because it cannot win a fair fight for the
American mind. — L. Brent Bozell III is Founder and President of both the Media Research Center and the Parents Television Council. Mr. Bozell is a nationally syndicated writer whose work appears in publications such as Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The New York Post, The L.A. Times, Investors Business Daily and National Review.
 Is Bozell right? Is "the left" losing the American culture wars?
= = = = = = =
 SUBSCRIBE to Media Savvy, MediaChannel's free daily news update.
= = = = = = =
SUPPORT MediaChannel's 2005 campaign by donating to MediaChannel.org
= = = = = = =
RETURN to MediaChannel's Homepage
= = = = = = =
|
