WaPo - E.J. Dionne - "Enough right-wing propaganda"

[TomCADem]

Dionne still gets it slightly wrong by blaming the White House for responding to the corporate media narratives when not too long ago, he was chirping along with the rest of the corporate media that President Obama needed to show more emotion following the BP oil disaster. Listen to the corporate media narrative or not?

Actually, what he gets right is that we really need to stop giving the corporate media, and Fox News in particular, a free pass. Many folks simply take it for granted that the right wing media will spread false propaganda. However, this should not be the case. The corporate media is pushing a fraud, and they should be called on it.

Too many people consider Fox News to be a legitimate news source for us to simply accept that Fox can lie with impunity. We also must not let go unchallenged the false equivalency arguments that equate Glenn Beck with Rachel Maddow. If we do not demand a legitimate news media, we will be left with propaganda that ignores the truth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/25/AR2010072502756.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party." Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

* * *

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda.

[Hekate]

1. KnR

[zbdent]

2. "simply accept that Fox can lie with impunity" ...

hell, they got a court order allowing them to lie with the "law's" blessing ...