The Corporate Media's Relationship With The Right-Wing Echo Chamber

As I was listening to Bush's press conference this morning, I thought of this depressing but on-the-money essay from Peter Daou over at Salon (via Kos). Daou describes how the Media, even when presenting news stories that might tend to hurt the Administration, nonetheless use certain "narratives" that simultaneously prop up Bush and put down his detractors:

You've heard the narratives: Bush is likeable, Bush is a regular guy, Bush is firm, Bush is a religious man, Bush relishes a fight, Democrats are muddled, Democrats have no message, national security is Bush's strength, terror attacks and terror threats help Bush (even though he presided over the worst attack ever on American soil), Democrats are weak on security, Democrats need to learn how to talk about values, Republicans favor a "strict interpretation" of the Constitution, and on and on.

A single storyline is more effective than a thousand stories. And a single storyline delivered by a "neutral" reporter is a hundred times more dangerous than a storyline delivered by an avowed partisan. Rightwingers can attack the media for criticizing Bush, can slam the New York Times for being liberal, but when the Times and the Post and CNN and MSNBC echo the "Bush stands firm" mantra, it adds one more brick to a powerful pro-Bush edifice.

These narratives are woven so deeply into the fabric of news coverage that they have become second nature and have permeated the public psyche and are regurgitated in polls. (The polls are then used to strengthen the narratives.) They are delivered as affirmative statements, interrogatives, hypotheticals; they are discussed as fact and accepted as conventional wisdom; they are twisted, turned, shaped, reshaped, and fed to the American public in millions of little soundbites, captions, articles, editorials, news stories, and opinion pieces. They are inserted into the national dialogue as contagious memes that imprint the idea of Bush=strong/Dems=weak. And they are false.

We see this stuff all over the place, such as when the Media kept referring to Bush as a "popular president" when the opposite was true, or on how my soon-to-be-former political party has essentially bought into all the bullshit about Bush being untouchable on security issues.

Fortunately, there has been some progress of late in combating this. Chris Matthews is under fire right now for repeatedly comparing folks who are concerned about the Iraq Debacle to Osama bin Laden. A website devoted to going after Matthews on this issue received over 100,000 visitors in five days.

You might be saying to yourself that stuff like this never works, but it does. Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote a column awhile back wherein she merely echoed G.O.P. talking points and stated that both Republicans and Democrats had received Abramoff campaign money. She received so much criticism for repeating that particular lie that the Washington Post had to shut down the part of its website where folks could send comments concerning Ombudsman Howell.

The editor of the American Journalism Review called the "fury and vitriol" unleashed against Howell both "stunning and disheartening."

I call it a good start.

UPDATE: This exchange took place this morning between Katie Couric and Howard Dean (from Think Progress):

COURIC: Hey, wait a second. Democrats took — Democrats took money from Abramoff too, Mr. Dean.

DEAN: That is absolutely false. That did not happen. Not one dime of money from Jack Abramoff went to any Democrat at any time.

COURIC: Let me just tell you — According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Abramoff and his associates gave $3 million to Republicans and $1.5 million to Democrats, including Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid.

DEAN: Not one dime of Jack Abramoff money ever went to any Democrat. We can show you the FEC reports, we’d be very happy to do it. There’s a lot of stuff in the press that the Republican National Committee’s been spinning that this is a bipartisan scandal. It is a Republican-financed scandal. Not one dime of money from Jack Abramoff ever went to any Democrat, not one dime.

COURIC: Well, we’ll obviously have to look into that and clarify that for our viewers at a later date. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Dean, Governor Dean, thanks so much for talking with us.

DEAN: Thanks very much.

I just love how aggressive members of the Corporate Media become when they are spreading BushCo lies. Of course, as Think Progress points out, the Center for Responsive Politics said no such thing.