Ah, that wacky liberal media

By jeffaclitus

Hello. Sorry about the dearth of posts from yours truly (that apology directed at the two of you who want more posts from me, not the legions who are either relieved at no longer having to scroll past my addled rantings or who have no idea who the hell I am). The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have me less inclined to pontificate to the internets recently, but then Michael threatened to kick me off the blog, so I figured I better post something.

Anyways, Amanda Marcotte has a great post up about the extreme stupidity and dishonesty involved in the game of gotcha the media is playing with John Edwards, who claims to care about poor people but who actually has mad bank.

Few things show how the media has become an echo chamber for the concerns of the wealthy elite than the fact that they smugly conflate being a class traitor to them with being a hypocrite. Of course, as Hightower notes, these are the same people who played like Bush was a good ol’ boy because he has a cattle-less gentleman’s ranch in Crawford. The only rednecks they can really handle are the ones who are all hat and no cattle, I suppose.

This is the part where I express my enthusiasm for the phrase "all hat, no cattle."

But, be that as it may, I think she's right. It's more or less true that the media is "liberal" in the sense of not being especially taken with folks who can't discuss sex without using the word "abomination" (and who don't seem interested in discussing much else). But the idea that writers for the major newspapers and online outlets like Slate actually care about, say, the forty-some million Americans without health care is nonsense. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part, "the media" represents the solidly, even banally, bourgeois outlook you would expect, promoting the interests of their class and having little attachment, sentimental or otherwise, to tradition. They only seem "radical" to some because there's such a lusty hold-over of old-tyme religion in this country (and because there's political and, in the case of Fox News and its like, monetary hay to be made out of bashing the liberal elite, which means above all the liberal media).