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I am really tired of the implicit assumption in almost all MSM reporting that “evangelicals” and other (non-Moslem, of course) religious fundamentalists are more “moral” than the rest of us. Since when did we secularists (religious and otherwise) cede the definition of morality to them? If you ask me, it’s pretty damn “immoral” to discriminate against gays and working women, or to force a thirteen year old girl who has been raped by her father to give birth to that child. What’s more, I don’t find a literal reading of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, to be a very...

...Ms. Roy has just been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.... Ms. Roy made an appeal to people to "become the Iraqi resistance," adding that activists "need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance." Now it cannot have escaped Ms. Roy's attention that the "resistance" of which she speaks -- and which she exhorts the world to "become" -- kills innocent Iraqis daily, by bomb, by gun and by cutlass. Beheading people -- Iraqi and Western, Muslim and infidel -- is the macabre signature of this...

(Apologies about the MSNBC full posting instead of excerpt and a link, which got this pulled ) More 'them' than 'us' (Still) A Land of Hopes and Dreams Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

I'm in a rental car with Al Franken, and we're driving across New Hampshire on the Sunday before the nation's first primary, heading to a John Edwards rally. The Democrats are in a kooky mood following the sudden collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa, and Franken -- comedian, celebrity, scourge -- is spending two days in the state not in any official capacity but as a sort of good-will representative from the party's satiric wing. He is not, as you might think from the outrageous trappings of his comedy, an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who...

It was quite a scene: a packed university auditorium, an expectant buzz, and an august panel assembled to ponder the momentous issues raised in a guerrilla documentary. No, not "Fahrenheit 911" but "Outfoxed," a movie aimed at the conservative "echo chamber" of the Fox News Network. Eric Alterman, the Nation writer, introduced left-wing all-stars such as Arianna Huffington, John Podesta and Paul Starr to the noisy students and other Manhattanites who had gathered at the New School for the movie's premiere. In the audience was Al Franken, who at one point, responding to a quip onstage, yelled out that Fox...

Frustrated liberals, angry at having to spend an entire week watching the nation pay tribute to the man they derided alternately as "an amiable dunce" and a heartless autocrat, are now claiming that Bill Clinton was actually a more popular president than Ronald Reagan. "In truth, Ronald Reagan was never as popular as he is being presented to be with Americans," writes Slate Magazine's Eric Alterman. "As president, [he] was never even as popular as Bill Clinton during the period of Clinton’s impeachment," argues the disgruntled Democrat. For evidence, Alterman cites a Gallup poll that tracks approval ratings for...

It may have the ring of cliché, but America's next presidential election will be among the most crucial events in contemporary history. Rarely in the modern era has the world seen such unchecked power exercised so ignorantly, arrogantly and with such profoundly counterproductive results as the Bush Administration's bait-and-switch invasion of Iraq. As Al Gore told an audience at NYU recently, "The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States." The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Gore noted, has...

Eric Alterman and Mark Green, The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America  (New York: Viking, 2004). George Bush drives the Left crazy. They hate the way he speaks. They hate his cowboy image. They hate his religious convictions. And they hate his moral clarity (anyone who can tell the difference between good and evil is, according to the Left, ignorant).  The Left hates Bush so much that they have now produced dozens of anti-Bush books, from David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush to Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling. One of the latest efforts is Eric Alterman’s...

Wow. I just finished watching Eric Alterman self destruct on The Daily Show. It was an amazing performance. One that even made the liberal Jon Stewart go, "WHAAAA?" Let's see, where to start? Oh yes. "American talk radio has less diversity than Stalin's Soviet Union." This comes as a surprise to those of us who were unaware there is a vast AM archipelago in America. What an absolutely inane comparison. Then we learn that the media HATED Gore, and was biased towards Bush because they thought Gore would be boring to cover. As a result, they were responsible for the...

Did anyone just see the "First Up" segment of DM tonight? He was interviewing uberliberal Eric Alterman who wrote "What Liberal Media?" and "The Book on Bush: How Bush (mis)leads America"...EA was giving short, smart aleck answers to Dennis' questions...Dennis said, something like, "Well, if you don't want to talk about that, what DO you want to talk about?"Eric began bashing the President's truthfulness and saying 12 years ago the Pentagon was giving Saddam poisonous gas to gas his own people. Dennis at one point muttered, "Let's get this (bleep) segment over with..." because Eric was not acknowledging any counter...

Perhaps you've heard that the New York Times fired a stringer named Jay Blotcher because he'd been a member of the anti-AIDS advocacy group ACT UP nearly fourteen years ago. Perhaps you've heard that ACT UP founder and fiery gay playwright Larry Kramer complained to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of "McCarthy-type blacklisting." Perhaps you're aware that although ACT UP did, way back when, single out the Times for what Kramer termed its "unconscionable refusal to write about us in any but the most hateful of ways, and for so long, and for your wretched, shameful early lack of coverage of...

I sat between this incredible guy who had been on death row for eighteen years before being freed by the Innocence Project at Medill Journalism school (the winner of this year’s $100K Puffin/Nation prize) and Joe Wilson, winner of this year’s Ron Ridenhour prize. I asked Joe why Powell had turned out to be such a wimp—failing to use any of his prized credibility to put the breaks on his lying colleagues, and instead telling all those falsehoods at the UN and convincing a boatload of gullible reporters of a whole mess of stuff that just ain’t so. Wilson—whose speech...

Bush Lies, Media Swallows Print this article E-mail this article Write to the editors he more things change... Roughly ten years ago, I celebrated the criminal indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress by writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times on the increasing acceptance of official deception. (I was just starting my dissertation on the topic back then.) The piece got bogged down, however, when an editor refused to allow me even to imply that then-President Bush was also lying to the country. I noted that such reticence made the entire exercise feel a bit absurd. He...

Amazing but true, the far-right media machine has successfully held CBS entertainment to a higher standard of truth regarding the docudrama, “The Reagans” than the news media manages to hold the Bush administration regarding the war in Iraq. The ability of these would-be censors to “work the refs” on the issue of the CBS movie, “The Reagans” is truly impressive. Setting a new standard for accuracy in TV docudramas - something that never troubled them, for instance, when a network had to invent a voice of morality in the Reagan White House for an Ollie North biopic based on Guts And Glory: The...

September 11 is often said to be the defining moment in the Bush presidency, even of modern history. How strange, therefore, that Bush's behavior that morning--along with that of his Administration--is almost never examined in any detail. This is all the more incredible when one considers the fact that 9/11 is among the most exhaustively chronicled days in human history and Bush among its most heavily covered individuals. No less odd has been the media's willingness to let the many inconsistencies in White House stories pass unexamined. They seem content instead to let Showtime tell the story, Leni Riefenstahl-style. That...

We [journalists] reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as . . . we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism. -- I hope we all get along as we go along. I expect that occasionally we will have some differences of opinion. I expect to be provocative. After more than 60 years as a journalist, I...

If you want to date the beginning of conservative domination of the opinion media, you could do worse than to pick Election Day 1964. That's when Richard Mellon Scaife, later joined by many others, figured out that it was pointless for wealthy conservatives to pour money into the coffers of conservative candidates like Barry Goldwater without first investing in their own form of media through which to communicate their ideas. The multibillion-dollar conservative investment helped to create much of the media world in which we wallow today. Liberals are now grappling with a problem not unlike that facing the far...

Proof Through Repetition and the "Liberal Bias" of the U.S. Media: A Review of Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? By NEIL H. BUCHANAN ---- Friday, June 20, 2003 Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? (Basic Books 2003) Can it ever be pointless to publish a well-written book? Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? is a nice piece of work. It combines uncompromising passion with sardonic humor, careful research, and incisive prose. Alterman makes a solid case that the legendary left-wing bias of the big-time American media is a myth. That so many people believe that myth is a testament to nothing more...

Is anyone fooled by claims that the media aren't liberal? If you listen to a growing chorus of liberals and leftists, you might think that one of America's biggest problems today is, hold onto your hats, "conservative media bias." When Al Gore announced he wouldn't run for president, he complained about the right-wing media. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is so convinced that the media are conservative he always puts "liberal media" in quotation marks to convey their mythical, unicorn-like quality. "Sooner or later, I think we're all going to have to acknowledge that the myth of the liberal...