i have no patience with the claim that there is anything apporaching a left or "liberal biais" in television reporting of "news" broadly construed. there are any number of sources that you could look to in order to get a sense of the institutional infrastructure the right has assembled over the past 20 years or so and on the effects of the activities undertaken by that infrastructure in shifting the dominant media discourse to the right.
below is a series from disinfopedia--but a little reserach could diversify these sources quite easily:
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...le=Think_tanks
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...elations_firms
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht..._organizations
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...iendly_experts
fact is that the right, in a general sense, understood the importance of tv better than did the left, such as it is in the sad scenario that is the states. they worked out a strategy for gaining and using access far better than the left, such as it is, managed. they developed more open-ended sources of funding to support these institutional efforts that did the left, such as it is. the simply outsmarted and out manoevered the opposition.
which i hate to have to have to say, but the facts are clear.
the above concerns infrastructure...the ways in which this infrastructure have worked to shift the dominant media discourse to the right (such that right assumptions about the world/economy etc. tend to function as a neutral frame of reference) varies to some extent by media outlet--but if you think about it, there is little in the claims concerning this effect that is open to any coherent counterargument.
this does not require that you point to absurd outlets like fox to make the case--fox is simply more obvious and reductive in their view.
cultural warfare on this level is not about particular outlets per se--it is about shifting the frame of reference.
as for conservatives who think television is tilted otherwise..this is more a psychologically complelling argument for you than it is an argument about the world. it functions within the right in more or less obvious ways: it structures a sense of martyrdom.
boo hoo, poor us, we have to deal with arguments from positions not entirely lined up with our own.
obviously we are being victimized in this.
boo hoo.
poor us.
but frankly, in the world that other people know about, i do not see what the right has to complain about.
except perhaps that the fact there is an opposition of any kind reminds conservatives of what they have to intuit at some level: the flimsiness of their arguments is their weakness--repetition does not equal logical or descriptve or political power---and any hegemony based on paper-thin arguments is weak. whence perhaps the sense of victimization--if you have paperthing arguments, you can only feel safe when you have crushed any opposition.