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Conservatives Are Quick To Ridicule Truth
When Al Gore Discusses Right Wing Media

          Once again, a prominent American political leader has dared to speak out against the growing power and influence of the right-wing media. And as always, a vicious barrage of sneering responses has followed, both in the press and on the airwaves.

            But as it has been said many times before, “ridicule is the best test of truth,” and therefore perhaps the recent attacks on former Vice President Al Gore will only serve to help him in his obvious attempt to open a dialogue with the American people.

            Gore, during an interview with Jay Leno over the Thanksgiving holiday, described on national television how it now is apparent a substantial amount of the American media, perhaps as much as a third of the whole, is committed to a right-wing agenda and therefore its coverage of the news should be understood to have a bias.

            What Gore said, as an extrapolation from a question Leno posed, is nothing more than what virtually everyone in the press and electronic media knows first hand, but it is the dirty big secret that no one in the mainstream media dares mention outside of cocktail conversation. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the primary ones are basic and quickly understandable; 1) Mainstream publishers and station owners don’t want to have any part of pointing a finger at their peers. 2) There is tremendous pressure to avoid discrediting the traditional reverence that newspapers especially, but the media in general, has enjoyed from the American public.

            Yet the reaction against Gore’s remarks is extraordinarily illustrative. The mainstream press has been largely silent, perhaps tacitly agreeing with him and happy to see the issue discussed without having to initiate it, but the right-wing media and its pundits have, in the youthful vernacular of a few years ago, ‘gone ballistic.’ A nerve has clearly been touched and rubbed, perhaps coming too close to the truth.

            A perfect example is the diatribe provided by Howard Kurtz, a conservative columnist that appears in The Washington Post and other papers, but his comments are mild compared to the kinds of inflammatory statements made by people like Rush Limbaugh and other hard right propagandists.

“Not since Hillary Clinton has a prominent Democrat so publicly ripped the conservatives for making people with D after their names look bad,” Kurtz begins, and after making some snide references to Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, adds that “unlike the former first lady, (who spoke of a ‘vast right wing conspiracy’), Gore specifically indicts elements of the media for carrying the right’s water. And he names names – unlike most pols who want to avoid ticking off those who buy ink by the barrel.”

The implied threat in the latter remark is traditional but this time even more remarkable, since such a warning may finally be ineffective; after all, publishers who will spill their ink barrels disparaging Mr. Gore and all Democrats would do so anyway, and so far the mainstream press hasn’t spent any ink on the subject, aside from printing 'balance columns' like Mr. Kurtz's. Not surprisingly, there are no 'liberal' columns providing balance in the conservative press.

            Kurtz also quotes an interview Gore gave the New York Observer, where the former vice president and presidential candidate apparently illustrated his point by noting that “something will start at the Republican National Committee (RNC), inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others.”

            Mr. Gore is then quoted as having further observed that the right-wing press will “create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they’ll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC (Republican National Committee) talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.”

            The ‘zeitgeist’ of course is nothing more than the spirit of the time, but what Mr. Gore is illustrating is how that tone and tenor in our national dialogue is being colored and altered – pushed to the right – by the calculated efforts of a growing media minority. This is a minority that the mainstream media – the majority – has so far avoided confronting and which now, ironically, it finds itself in actual danger of being overwhelmed by because the right-wing media is beginning to set the news agenda.

“So you could depict this as a profile in courage. Or a profile in self-destructiveness,” Kurtz continues, rhetorically asking: “What, after all, does the ex-veep gain by denouncing the likes of Fox News and the Washington Times?”

            Well, for starters Mr. Gore pointed to two very potent and influential media outlets that are either owned now or in the recent past by reactionary foreigners. The first by the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch and the second by the so-called Rev. Sun Yung Moon, of the Moonie cult fame.

            Neither of these individuals has shown anything but contempt for Americans and their democratic form of government. Mr. Murdoch's contempt is most easily shown by how his media consistently plays to the lowest common denominator in public taste, and then seeks to find how much lower it is possible to drive it down and still make money, and the latter's contempt is shown by a consistent and longstanding attempt to proselytize an Asian style of quasi-religious totalitarian government based on uniform compliance with state policies.

          But those are just two of the more conspicuous right-wing media outlets. There are many others, some little known and some well known, such as the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages are a study in right-wing techniques.

            The twists and turns of the right-wing polemicists as they seek to justify the slant their media uses is remarkable to witness, and the higher toned among them, such as Mr. Kurtz, offer the best examples.

            “Let’s say Gore is right, that conservative news outlets are trying to blacken the reputations of people like him. Doesn’t complaining about it just sound like whining?” Mr. Kurtz asserts with a question, then suggests: “Or is he playing to his base, the way conservatives have done all these years by moaning about the liberal media?”

            But what Al Gore has begun talking about isn’t whining. He’s showing great political courage in discussing publicly something everyone in politics and the media understands very well yet which has remained largely invisible to the public until now. This is also a point in which Mr. Kurtz’s professional conscience visibly appears as he notes that Gore’s point could be correct; that is, that the conservative media is indeed running a concerted effort to discredit all but right-wing viewpoints.

            Mr. Kurtz is much less forthcoming and much more obtuse when he suggests Gore may be taking a cue from the conservatives as they whine about the liberal media.

It is impossible to believe an experienced columnist like Howard Kurtz doesn’t fully understand that there is no overall liberal media. It doesn’t exist and never did exist. The press and the electronic media are businesses; they are largely, overwhelmingly owned by businesspeople, not idealists or – in today’s world – even by news people. And most of those media owners, those businesspeople, are in fact Republicans. So when the conservatives have whined about a “liberal media,” they were employing one of the most sophisticated propaganda ruses of modern times.

            By hammering away at the idea of an overall ‘liberal press,’ the Republicans and their increasingly hard-right conservative base have managed to create the illusion of something that never existed, while at the same time discrediting liberal thought and political expression to such an extent that it seemed that any given newspaper or radio or TV medium was being more responsible if it was conservative in tone.

            The effectiveness of this campaign, which has been relentless for more than thirty years, is reflected in the fact that what used to be middle of the road in America is now way over beyond the right curb, making a new road through the bushes.  Given Twentieth Century history, therefore, it should not be surprising that some of our elected leaders are directly threatened by the power of the hard-right.

             It was noted in a recent Associated Press story that “senate majority leader Tom Daschle says threats have increased against him and his family and blames talk show host ‘Rush Limbaugh and all of the Rush Limbaugh wannabes’ for an increasingly negative tone in politics.”

            “What happens when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people are not satisfied just to listen,” Daschle told the AP reporter and other news people in an interview just before Thanksgiving, “they want to act because they get emotionally invested. And so, you know, the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that’s very disconcerting.”

            What great understatement. Certainly it’s disconcerting! It is historically what has happened with right-wing and fascistic politics throughout the 20^th Century. When right-wing news and propaganda becomes so intrusive and so pervasive that average people begin to believe its assertions automatically, then it is easy to make those same individuals feel threatened by anyone who speaks in contradiction to the points they have come to accept.

            Al Gore has done everyone a great service by daring to bring this subject before all of America, first on national television and subsequently in various interviews.
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