Maybe you still believe that claims of a biased liberal media are nothing but the deranged muttering of paranoid conservatives.
And it could very well be that you refuse even to entertain the possibility that the mainstream media’s coverage of this year’s presidential campaign is driven to a large extent by a single-minded determination to send George W. Bush home to Texas and see to it that John F. Kerry is elected the 44th president of the United States.
What, then, do ye of such childlike faith make of recent remarks by one of the pillars of the liberal media establishment? How do you respond to remarks that in their unexpected candor blow away the media’s carefully constructed Potemkin village in which cadres of scrupulously objective scriveners provide the republic with balanced, accurate reporting, without a trace of political favoritism?
The Monitor refers to Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas, who, with a few choice words on the syndicated PBS discussion program “Inside Washington,” confirmed that the old leftist bugaboo known as the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (last seen trawling the fever swamps of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s overactive imagination) has nothing on the very real Immense Left-Wing Media Gang-Up.
“Let’s talk a little media bias here,” said Thomas. “The media, I think, want Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards – I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but – they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there’s going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.”
Of course, Thomas’s own magazine was at the front of the Kerry-Edwards parade with an embarrassingly gushy cover story and a package of related rah-rah material that the Democrats would do well to hand out at campaign rallies from now to November.
Not that Newsweek’s full partisan mode came as a surprise – the magazine violates the narrowest interpretation of what constitutes truth in advertising whenever it bills itself as a newsweekly rather than a journal of liberal opinion – George Will’s every-other-week back of the book column notwithstanding.
In the wake of the Monitor’s anti-Michael Moore column of three weeks ago, some obviously benighted readers wrote in defending Moore on the grounds that “Fahrenheit 9/11” is anti-Bush, not anti-Israel. These readers apparently never cracked open either of Moore?s two recent best-selling books, “Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation” and “Dude, Where’s My Country?”
Though he insists that he supports Israel’s right to exist as an independent nation, Moore?s prose (if one may be permitted to so describe his jottings) quivers with righteous passion whenever he so much as writes a sentence containing the word “Palestinian.” In “Dude, Where’s My Country? – which he dedicated to the late International Solidarity Movement activist Rachel Corrie – Moore wonders “why hundreds of millions of people” are so virulently opposed to Israel.
“Now I’m not talking about your everyday anti-Semites,” Moore writes. “No, I’m talking about a perceived notion that we Americans are supporting Israel in its oppression of the Palestinian people. Now where did those Arabs come up with an idea like that? Maybe it was when that Palestinian child looked up in the air and saw an American Apache helicopter firing a missile into his baby sister?s bedroom just before she was blown into a hundred bits….”
Moore concedes that Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians, but then observes: “You would think that would make every Israeli want to wipe out the Arab world, but the average Israeli does not have that response. Why? Because in their hearts, they know they are wrong, and they know they would be doing just what the Palestinians are doing if the sandal were on the other foot.”
It may be unfair to do so, but it bears pointing out that each of the pro-Michael Moore correspondents who contacted the Monitor made it clear that he or she cannot wait to vote for John Kerry this fall.