Rather Litigious

Dan Rather is suing CBS, according to the New York Times. The basics of his case is that, in the fall out of his 2004 National Guard story about George W. Bush, CBS News deliberately put together a panel of GOP and conservative ringers to investigate Rather’s story, hoping to get conservative detractors off their backs.

The constant cries of “liberal bias” that surround anything conservatives don’t care for has always confused me. As we’ve seen in recent days, conservatives continue to dominate our Sunday talk shows, there is an explicitly conservative cable news network, conservative papers abound and talk radio is dominated by conservative voices. In short, it is not difficult to find someone advocating for conservative policy positions and the conservative worldview.

All of this is not to argue that there is, in fact, a conservative bias in the media. In fact, if anything, there is an establishment bias to most of our major news organizations. The cult of centerism has a long and storied history in our political culture, and I doubt that it’s going to go away anytime soon. I do believe that there is a gravitational pull to a lot of our media that favors conservative ideas – someone like Glen Beck or Sean Hannity regularly espouse lunatic ideas on their programs while wholly lacking in a liberal counterpoint. No one has offered Ward Churchill a TV show that I’ve noticed. The most successful thing that conservatives have done in domestic politics in this century is to convince people that the media has a liberal bias.

Rather’s story and the network’s reaction to it represented the high water mark for the mainstream media’s conservative pandering. September 11th kind of deranged a lot of US media organizations into being even more establishmentarian than usual, which is saying something. The government, of course, being run by conservatives at that moment in time. It also happened to coincide with the bitter fight over the Iraq War, when a lot of progressive voices argued that the anti-war position couldn’t get much of a hearing in the US media.

Social conservatives came of age in the shadow of a largely Democratic establishment, and a lot of their attitudes reflect that legacy. Unfortunately, we’re quite a ways from the Roosevelt coalition in American politics. Conservatism has perfected a form of victimhood and a persecution complex that seemed somewhat at odds when they were in power during the Bush era. Remember Rush Limbaugh’s “America Held Hostage” tag? Now that they have been (pretty resoundingly) kicked to the curb, at least for a few years, conservatives will be able to go back to doing what they do best: working the refs, implying that the United States is a center-right nation and complaining about how progressives are traitors and terrorist-coddlers. It’s nice to have them back.