Conservatives and Republicans charge that it's the fawning liberal Democratic media that is putting Barack Obama ahead of John McCain.
The latest salvo is one of those universally e-mailed columns. It was written by an otherwise obscure guy who says the Democrats caused the mortgage meltdown by helping poor people get houses, but that Obama supporters in the media won't tell that truth.
It's insane. It wasn't Democrats or poor people who concocted a wide array of hollow financial instruments to try to cash in on irresponsible housing loans and irrationally exuberant home prices.
This nonsense springs up every four years. Agitated Republicans, irked about having to stand for consideration by an electorate that includes actual regular people, start whining about a liberal Democratic media that does not exist.
The media are conservative Republican, of course.
Look at the company employing me. It's owned by a conservative.
This newspaper group has its flagship paper in Las Vegas, where the publisher writes a weekly column from the right.
Look at the major statewide daily newspaper in Arkansas. It's owned by a Republican. Its editorials are doctrinaire Republican, excepting an occasionally enlightened moment on a social, cultural or libertarian issue. Its columnists range from the bitterly conservative to the mystically conservative.
The Little Rock television stations are, to the extent that they represent thinking at all, nondescript or to the right. One of them is owned by a Washington outfit that ordered an on-air endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate a few years ago. Another espouses some kind of supposed traditional values coverage sometimes called "community journalism," which apparently is different from actual journalism. A third is simply odd and the fourth, the newest kid on the block, hasn't really registered yet.
On national cable, Fox News exists simply and solely to advance Republicans and ridicule and smear Democrats. CNN plays it straight by stringing together so many analysts from both sides that you can't view them all on a 60-inch flat screen. Anderson Cooper needs a golf cart to get back and forth.
MSNBC has Democratic cheerleader Keith Olbermann, but otherwise it comes at you with the erratic Chris Matthews and an uncommonly unpleasant kid named David Schuster who once said that Hillary Clinton, by campaigning with her fully willing adult daughter Chelsea, was "pimping out" her own child.
The three major networks are entertainment-oriented anymore, not philosophical. It is true that all three anchorpersons have now stumped Sarah Palin in interviews. But that is no great or partisan accomplishment. Give Palin this series a, b, c and ask her what comes fourth. I bet she says network.
The New York Times is to the left editorially, yes. It's also the only American newspaper that bothers to cover the world anymore on its own, that is, without relying on The Associated Press. And it's not nearly as far to the left as the other greatest American newspaper is to the right.
I refer to The Wall Street Journal.
Actually, though, there's this: When Wall Street went broke from greed and incompetence, the Journal editorially advocated a socialist solution.
The Journal editorial page argued that government spending to bail out flat-busted thieves was more reasonable than government spending for Medicare. It's reasoning was that government might get some of its investment back for bailing out flat-busted thieves, but won't get anything back from, say if I may use a personal example paying for part of my 78-year-old mom's physician-ordered ultrasound the other day.
She was fine. Thanks for asking.
I guess I've found the left-wing media. It's led by the statists and collectivists of The Wall Street Journal editorial page who want government to prop up some things high finance, anyway, if not health care. Thieves if not momma, that is.
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
