I'm sure most people here already know about the topic I’m going to talk about, but it’s so absolutely crucial that I’m going to talk about it anyway.
All of us need to be flooding the media with e-mails EVERY SINGLE TIME they distort the truth about a Democrat or publish something that is biased against a Democrat or is inane or irrelevant or in any other way falls short of the media’s responsibility to be accurate, unbiased, substantive, etc.
As Jamison Foser at Media Matters said very powerfully and persuasively last May, "The defining issue of our time is the media." Here is...
a fuller quote:
The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.
The defining issue of our time is the media.
The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruthlessness or the tactical and strategic superiority of the Republicans, and it is not your favorite theory about what is wrong with the Democrats.
The dominant political force of our time is the media.
Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.
He goes on to back up this seemingly hyperbolic claim with astounding examples that a lot of younger and/or newer readers here are probably not familiar with. I urge everyone who hasn’t read Foser’s essay to go read it right now, and everyone who has read it already might want to read it again. Here’s the link: http://mediamatters.org/...
And Foser’s latest essay is a must-read, too. Go read it...and get mad. Here is the link for it: http://mediamatters.org/...
Another writer everyone should read regularly in this regard is Bob Somerby at DailyHowler.com. Here is Somerby begging Kevin Drum to do what I’m begging everyone here to do:
Dude! Please! we found ourselves saying [in response to Kevin Drum’s saying that it was Somerby’s, not his own, "beat" to correct the media’s misleading narratives about Democrats]. Please make our beat your beat too! "Idiotic media narratives" have driven our recent White House campaigns. It’s perfectly obvious that these idiot narratives decided the outcome of Campaign 2000, thereby changing the course of U.S. and world history. But it has been very hard to get liberal observers to walk this important and crime-ridden beat.... Kevin has superlative analytical skills. We’d love to see him apply these skills—often—to this key field of study.
...We should all work harder to strip these narratives out of this coming White House election.
It’s literally the least we can do. It requires a couple of minutes at most, no money, and you don’t even have to get up from your computer. All you have to do is send some e-mail. You don’t even have to write anything yourself; just copy and paste and link to the many media watchdog websites out there, and then e-mail the material and/or links to the appropriate media outlet, most of whose e-mail addresses are easily found by going to their websites or Media Matters’ website. MediaMatters.org and DailyHowler.com are two of the best media watchdog sites I’ve come across, and are constantly providing material we can use to keep the media in check this time around. I really believe this is THE key to winning elections and getting more people on our side.