On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos announced that Laura Ingraham was joining ABC News as a contributor. So the network that long employed a Cuomo and still employs a Clinton "bimbo" destroyer has formalized a relationship with a conservative pundit. To the Left, this is yet another example of the mainstream media attempting to compensate for a liberal bias which never was significant and vanished altogether roughly forty years ago. They want no debate.
In a Tuesday piece for Salon, Heather Digby Parton, who blogs at her own site under the name Digby, asserted that the conservative claim of liberal media bias is "absurd" and a "political tactic" that "[d]espite the rise of FOX News and hundreds of right wing talk show hosts dominating much of the airwaves" somehow remains effective. Oh, and by the way, Ingraham is a "vile racist" and a former "vicious homophobe" who "has transferred all of that hatred on to undocumented workers."
It was once an article of faith among many Americans, including many members of the press, that the news media was a hotbed of left wing propaganda, so filled with liberal bias that one had to use a decoder ring to get the truth. There may have been a grain of truth in it during the early days of Camelot and perhaps in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, but for the most part the media has always shown a bias toward the establishment, regardless of which party or ideology is dominant at a particular time.
However, the modern conservative movement, believing as it does in the All American capitalist maxim "there's a sucker born every minute" used this perceived bias as a political tactic, what wags called "working the refs," wherein they would accuse the press of being liberal so often that reporters would second-guess themselves and bend over backwards to accommodate a more conservative viewpoint. Despite the rise of FOX News and hundreds of right wing talk show hosts dominating much of the airwaves, they are still able to convince mainstream news organizations that they are biased and lacking in authentic conservative voices...
Nobody has been more of a vociferous critic of the news media's alleged liberal bias than talk radio host and conservative commentator Laura Ingraham...
Ingraham must be feeling some sort of vindication today. ABC News has announced that she is their newest contributor. And she'll be allowed to keep her job at Fox News subbing for Bill O'Reilly and also her daily radio show. Perhaps conservatives can finally relax a little bit about being so marginalized. It would appear we won't be able to escape them...
