Why They Call it "The Liberal Media"

We have Richard Nixon to thank for the phrase The Liberal Media, and in that long-ago era I logically deduced that, with the media being part of the establishment, it would probably ideally position itself slightly to the right of center. Indeed, in a time when television reporters could and would actually ask a commander-in-chief some tough questions at a press conference, and the commander-in-chief generally felt a public obligation to personally appear at many such press briefings, the American Fourth Estate appeared to me to lean a bit to the right, but not particularly so.

I naively thought that the so-called Liberal Media's fawning adoration of Ronald Reagan would forever put an end to the phrase. As the hard-hitting questions of a typical 1980 Carter press conference suddenly gave way to a kid-glove approach to Reagan, who often didn't even bother to show up for briefings, the idea of a liberal media seemed ludicrous. Following the Reagan years, I watched the Corporate Media tilt more to the right, even as the self-labeled conservative mouthpieces accused that media more and more of tilting to the left, so that by 2003 you could hardly find a single voice speaking out against the right-wing clique that engineered GWB's invasion of Iraq. Watching this unfold, I thought, as TYT's Cenk Uygur has suggested, that the right-wingers were working the refs, so to speak -- they were constantly accusing the Corporate Media of left-wing bias simply to get that media to swing more to the right.

Then a few years ago, I moved into a place where I shared common spaces with a renter who I did not know very well at the time. During one of our first political conversations, he told me that he considered himself a centrist, and that he liked to hear both sides of an issue. He understood that Fox News presented the conservative side, and he told me that he would watch CNN, CBS, NBC or ABC to get the liberal side. This sounded to me like striking a balance between the strongly right wing and the crazy extreme of the right wing, and I had to ask him why he thought the corporate media outlets he named, other than Fox, were liberal. "What is liberal about CNN, or CBS?" He had no answer for the question, and he could only say that all the major news stations other than Fox seemed liberal to him, whatever that meant.

Getting to know him better over the next couple of years, which will happen when you share common living spaces, I began to get a stronger impression of how much this fellow leaned to the right, despite the fact that he had voted for Obama in 2008. Still, I didn't realize just how much he depended on Fox for his facts until the moment, in the summer of 2012, when he revealed his birther leanings, saying that "a lot of people were talking about it." Well, in fact, there was only one place on the dial where "a lot of people were talking about it," so at that point I knew he had to be spending a lot of time on Fox. I quickly pointed out the logical absurdity of the birther arguments, and took some small comfort in the fact that he could still respond to logic in basic conversation, despite his obvious attraction to the Fox world view. Not long after the birther exchange, I saw quite clearly why he said the media, other than Fox, seemed liberal to him.

George W. Bush once said to Joe Biden, "I don't do nuance, Joe."  Well, neither does Fox News, and this is the key to why the watchers take such comfort in the world view that it expresses. Take the millions of colors from a snapshot, and convert it not just to grayscale, but to purely black and white, and you have arrived at Fox. While the Fox folks may occasionally admit to the existence of exceptions, largely, in the Fox world view, a Muslim = a terrorist, a latino = an illegal alien, a doctor who performs abortions = a baby killer, a typical black teenager = a thug, and on and on. When the folks who like Fox News call the rest of the media liberal, it seems liberal to them because it presents a view of the world which, regardless of how much it might lean towards the conservative side, is still nuanced, and nuance, in and of itself, seems liberal to the Fox audience. To put it bluntly, Fox News puts it bluntly, and that's what the Fox audience wants. If you substitute the word blunt for Fox and nuance for liberal, when you hear Foxers use the phrase the liberal media, then you'll know why they call it the liberal media.