Conservative propaganda feeds the sheep

Critical Massing: The Press Critic's Press Critic On Iraq, The White House, And Why The New York Times Is ?- Gasp! ?- Doing A Good Job

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You've talked a lot about a network of conservative outlets - talk radio show hosts, cable news hosts, political pundits, bloggers - who have severely damaged the press's credibility by constantly tagging the press as liberal and out of touch with regular people. How should the press respond?

I think that the main way they have to deal with all that is to try to ignore it. I've sometimes thought, "Why doesn't The New York Times do more to, say, cover Fox News?" Here we're getting into an area that's been another bugaboo of mine, which is the media coverage by papers like The New York Times. The Times has more of it than ever, and some of it's quite useful, but it's also weak in a lot of ways. And one of the ways it's weak is [in] covering the actual programming and content of the news media. Their stories tend to be so business-oriented, whereas what's shown on Fox News provides an incredibly rich source of information about what's going on on the right, how they're presenting the world, how they're going after the media. And I think it would be great, in many ways, for The New York Times to write about that, or to write about the talk radio world.

For one of the articles that I did for The New York Review, I was like an anthropologist going out into a foreign land and listening in to those raving right-wing talk shows. It was extraordinary what I learned about how these shows worked, about what they're saying. You can see how the perceptions of many people in America are molded by them.

So I think there should be much better coverage of that. That would be one way, in a sense, of documenting the excesses of what gets aired. I heard Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Michael Savage say things that made my jaw drop, because of their ugliness, inaccuracy, or extremity. It would be great if the Times had a regular column or some reporter covering that world.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eat-the-press/2006/09/22/critical-massing-the-pre_e_30005.html