The Media Has Always Been And Will Always Be Liberal-- Just Ask Any Republican

It was probably apparent to astute observers since the day Obama was elected that the Republican Party would do their worst in trying to delegitimize him and to even go so far as to punish America for electing him, all in the service of recapturing the government for their never changing fascist agenda. From day one Kyl, the #2 man in the Senate Republican caucus, said they would block his nominees, while Jim DeMint started off the year by talking about "breaking him" and bringing on his "Waterloo." Meanwhile, the GOP's top communications force, Rush Limbaugh, has only gotten more hysterical and more extreme since his "I want him to fail" fit at the beginning of his term. Wednesday we tried to demonstrate how driving up the unemployment rate has been Republican Party policy since Obama became president. Thursday Robert Parry did a brilliant analysis of Republican strategy over at AlterNet. The whole thing is very much worth reading (which is why I provided the link) but below are some takeaways:

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.

...Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

Parry is only just beginning and, again, I urge you to read his entire post. I just want to add that the right-wing control of the media is something they've been perfecting since the ruling elites were stung by the muckrakers in the early 1900s. As we saw last month, the robber barons simply got together at bought enough of the media to control the conventional wisdom from then on. It's worse than ever now. Glen Yeadon has a subchapter in his book, The Nazi Hydra in America called "The Press Sells Out To The Nazis," and while it certainly did, I want to draw on some of his research that emphasizes how the Republicans have used the media to further they far right political agenda (rather than Hitler's, which is well documented by Yeadon). In the 1930s, with only 3 or 4 exceptions "all the large newspaper columnists and radio commentators were right wing reactionaries... The 1930s media was overtly pro-fascist, especially the major chains of newspapers. Hearst admired Mussolini and even paid him to write articles for his upstart United Press wire services. Mussolini was paid $1,750 per article an amount that would be the equivalent of about $17,000 today. The articles were poorly written by Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini's mistress." Hearst tried to get Hitler as well. How different is it today? Do you watch Fox News? Or even Meet The Press?

The situation remains unchanged in the 21st Century. The columnists and the radio mouthpieces are almost fully hard right in their views. ... Today the media is even more consolidated than the media in the 1940s, less than ten corporations control over eighty percent of the airwaves and press. The Republicans have repeated the lie that the media is biased to the left so many times that many people buy into it-- even though the reverse is true. ... In the sixty years that have followed WWII the Republican Party and the far right wing extremists have adopted the philosophy at the heart of fascism, corporate rule. It is the basis for the intense hatred of unions and working people. In the entire eight years of the Reagan administration the minimum wage was not raised once although inflation still raged through the early 80s.

What does the video below have to do with the stuff above? Use your imagination