the above material--the last segment at least, comes from the pen of the right honorable l. brent bozell, the right's pet "media watchdog" whose methods are questionable at best.
read the mission statement of bazell's organization here:
http://www.mediaresearch.org/about/aboutwelcome.asp
the political character of this particular source is evident--the group bozell fronts (or is) set out to "demonstrate" the conservative canard about "liberal biais" in the press...he assumed the existence of this biais up front and made it the center for the construction of largely anecdotal articles that "prove" his point.
bozell is a beautiful example of the type of guy who functions to provide an echo for the general mechanism of projection that has been central to right ideology for at least a decade: if you are doing something questionable, blame the other side for exactly the same thing.
i do not think you could say the same about sydney schanberg--had the article at the start of the thread been bit from an editorial in the village voice, i could perhaps see the point of the above--but it is simply published there by someone with a long and very well-known track record as a journalist--for the most part associated with the new york times, a pulitzer prize winner, etc.
if i have time later, i'll locate data about the extent to which in 2005 television has become the dominant medium for the gathering of infotainment by many americans. with all its obvious problems--inability to contextualize information, inability to accomidate complexity--on and on--much of the bush's "war on terror" is as it is, in my view, because it is fitted to television--quick images of arbitrary violence, no thought about cause, no context--ridiculous interpretations floated on the basis of fragmented information. a significant element in what schanberg is saying is driven by the gradual shift away from print media and toward television in this regard.
the contemporary right media apparatus is organized on very different grounds than has been the american press before it: it is a tightly co-ordinated space---consider the roger ailes chaired fox news, whose working practices are fairly well documented--but if you want to see a nice quick and painful demonstration of them, simply watch "outfoxed"--the way fox news works internally is not like how other networks have operated--there is a daily set of talking points, which are purely political in motivation, that is circulated throughout the faux news set-up every day that dictates from the top which stories will be covered, which lines willbe emphasized, which stories ignored, etc. this is not a news organization: it is a purely political operation that uses video footage as a kind of footnote system to conceal the political nature of what the network is doing. you will not find parallel types of "news" gathering and dissemination outside right media.
there is abundant documentation about the history, nature, and limits of this conservative instrument for what amounts to cultural warfare. i find it baffling that the existence of it is still up for debate. i can see maybe why conservatives themselves would at points prefer to pretend that there no particular difference in kind between the information sources they prefer and others--but i think this has no empirical correlate, is simply a kind of wish that is expressed.
that this apparatus is not coincident with the entirety of the press in the states is obvious--i am not sure what the point is of saying it--that the dominant frame of reference within which most of the american press operates is conservative is also obvious--think about the extent to which all media outlets in the states understand capitalism as an unqualified good, and move from there. very little space for serious critique of the existing order, either at the economic level (globalizing capitalism) or at the political level. that the right media relies on perpetuating the illusion that it is marginal, under attack from its evil fantasy double--you know, this fiction they enjoy called "the Left" in america (which again seems to lump together everyone to the left of paul weyrich)--is another form of projection. nothing else.
that the net provides easy acces to an international press, and thereby to the possibility of gathering and processing information from viewpoints not either directly dominated by the american right or working from a frame of reference significantly shaped by the right, is a fine thing--but at the same time, it reflects the sad state of affairs that obtains domestically that one would have to search out other papers from other countries just to get anything like an idea of what is happening in the world outside the narrow, self-defeating view of the bush administration and its buddies in the conservative press.
maybe the situation would not be so bad if the conservative press provided anything like an accurate picture of what is going on in the world--but it doesnt--think about the iraq war for example. personally, i think conservatives in general are afraid of the world, afraid of dissonance, afraid of information, afraid to think that maybe reality is complex and easy judgements are absurd.
but what keeps despair at bay is that often individual conservatives, when i talk to them or exchange quips on messageboards with them disguised as debate, are not as limited in their thinking and views as the media they draw information from is or would have them be. what this means is there is some reason for hope for the rest of us: over time this version of the right will fall in and its constituency scatter. you cant lie systematically to intelligent people for long before those people start to withdraw consent.
but this changes nothing about the state of affairs.