You Are What You Eat

I’m getting more and more confused by the “liberal media”—now referred to (interchangeably) as the “mainstream media”. You hear that term thrown around a lot on TV and radio these days. The Internet is flush with articles and blogs decrying the liberal bias of the “mainstream media”. I did a Google Search on the exact phrase “Mainstream Media”: Results 1 - 10 of about 4,880,000. So there are at least 4.8 million links to articles about this menace not including the Drudge Report. It’s almost gotten to the point where you can’t watch, listen or read anything in the media these days without hearing something about how the media is liberally biased.

My confusion surrounds the insidious and conspiratorial nature of this plague of liberal misinformation and how they let the cat of the bag about their own existence. I am constantly bombarded with news about how “effective” they are at brainwashing Americans and how they work hand-in-hand with the all-powerful Federal Government to foist their leftist/socialist/communist/fascist/Kenyan agenda on us. But these supposedly near-omnipotent controllers of the mainstream media can’t seem to keep their own dirty little secret.

We all recall the terrible liberal media bias of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Oh, “They” try to cover it up with reports by The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) who found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign. “They” are, no doubt, just another liberal mouthpiece for the left wing. Even the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has challenged CMPA's non-partisan claim, based on the argument that much of its funding has come from conservative sources, and that its founder, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, once held a chair in mass communications at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and was a Fox News contributor. You didn’t hear about that study? No? Hmmm. It must not have been widely reported in the media.

While the three major network’s evening news broadcasts still garner a larger share of the audience during that time slot, Bill O’Reilly has claimed that he has bested at least one of them on occasion. But that’s not the whole story. The important statistic here is not the total numbers who watch during a given time-slot, but rather the total number of hours of news watched. When speaking in those terms, the network evening news programs aren’t even a blip on the screen when compared to the 24x7 cable news channels. Here we see continued shrinking of the major network news audience while MSNBC is growing and CNN is standing pat. Basically, Fox news has three times the viewers of their next closest rival. And with around-the-clock broadcasting it’s downright pervasive.

“Fox News, which launched in 1996, will finish out 2009 with the network's best ratings in its history, averaging 2.2 million Total Viewers in primetime. Compared to the same timeslot in 2008, Glenn Beck is up 96% in total viewers (averaging 2.3 million). Bill O'Reilly, who now makes it 10 years as the top cable news program, was up 13% in Total Viewers with 3.3 million tuning in.” - Kevin Allocca, Mediabistro.com (Data by Nielsen Media Research)

So I guess I have some bad news for the “alternative” media out there — like Rush Limbaugh (the most listened-to radio program in the U.S.) — who seem to fret so much over the liberal bias of the “mainstream media”. You ARE the mainstream media. You are “They”. So what do you have to say for yourselves?