Pointing out the obvious-- because we still have to.

Good stuff from Eric Alterman-- "Conservative Media, Liberal Nation" is the sort of statement that sets right-wing eyes a-rollin', but it's completely self-evident. When giant multinationals control the media, they view it through the profit motive. It isn't about information and ideals, but profits. Besides, if liberals actually controlled the media, don't you think we'd be seeing, in place of endless stories about missing white girls, stories about the $9 billion that went missing in Iraq? The hundreds of millions in state funds lost by Republican donors in Ohio? The government still giving billions of dollars to Halliburton in spite of the fact that they've been defrauding us for years? Highly recommended.

The media's near Pavlovian recitation of the right's talking points in re the moral values issue points out how successful right-wing media critics have been in convincing reporters that they are somehow out of step with the lives and values of "ordinary" Americans. The fact is conservatives currently control every level of government, not to mention huge swaths of talk radio, cable TV and the network news shows. So when conservatives criticize the media, they're simply playing a con – casting themselves as the victims of media bias and scaring reporters away from covering the right as critically as they do the left. Ironically, they happen to have a point: To a significant extent, the media are out of step with the majority of Americans on 'values'-related issues. What ought to be shocking to everyone who isn't paying attention, however, is that those values are a great deal more liberal than either the media or their right-wing minders imagine.

A Pew Research Center for People and Policy poll conducted in May 2005 throws this misperception into high relief, confirming a trend that has remained unchanged for decades. If the media were genuinely interested in accurately portraying the values of ordinary Americans, some of these numbers might receive some coverage. The poll shows that on most of the most important social issues facing Americans today, the public mind is much further to the left than it is the right.

I highly recommend clicking on that last link. If you take the time to read the descriptions of the 'types' they use to categorize information, it'll tell you just what the liberal blogs have been saying all along-- the current GOP agenda is the offspring of a tiny group of Americans-- rich, white, right-wing Portestants.