How the media got the "Liberal" label

[Walt Starr]

Why, for telling the truth about Nixon, of course!

All that had to happen was for the media to show the world how crooked the Nixon administration was and BANG, Liberal Media.

This was probably the single greatest factor in stopping the media from going after the crimes of the Bush Administration. They worried that they would be viewed as "over-zealous Liberal Media".

See how easily the Radical Rightist Republican Criminals pushed their way into getting away wiht it for so long? Fortunately, their hubris will be their downfall because they have convinced themselves that finally, they get to be above the law.

[Lannes]

1. That book by Bernard Goldberg didnt help either.

They love to use it as reference material.

[jim3775]

2. I don't know if it was just "telling the truth" as much as it was

the non-stop coverage of the watergate hearings.

Thanks to a little googling; "One survey found that 85% of all U.S. households had tuned in to at least some portion of the hearings."

[rndmprsn]

3. exposing jim crow and reporting on civil rights violations in the south

didn't do much to endear the "media" to our fellow red states either.

[Clark2008]

4. Spiro Agnew coined the phrase, if I remember correctly.

At lease, he was one of the first to use it in an interview.

[dbt]

8. That sounds about right!

Agnew was such a loyal attack dog. Anything that was too extreme for Nixxon to say, Agnew had no problem with. Any new meme that the Pugs wanted to trot out, Agnew was their guinea PIG.

[Gabi Hayes]

5. you're exactly right, and you can PINpoint it:

the Powell memo....not Colin, but Justice Powell, who wrote the now famous memo, encouraging the rich wingnuts to start funding their OWN media

here:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=21

actual memo
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=22

The Greatest Power Grab
Beginning in the early 1970s, a new conservative establishment set a counter-movement in motion to replace the institutions and expunge the ideas of American liberalism, which had dominated public thought and social policy since the New Deal. A new breed of conservatives sought to roll back a set of social gains going back to FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Kennedy.

They shifted the nation rightward; tilted the distribution of the nation's assets away from the middle class and the poor, the elderly, and the young; they red-penciled laws and legal precedents at the heart of American justice. They aimed to corporatize Medicare and Social Security. They marketed class values while accusing their opponents of "class warfare." They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and the poor, voters, and minorities. They slashed the taxes of corporations and the rich, and rolled back the economic gains of the rest. They came to dominate or heavily influence centers of scholarship, law, and politics, education, and governance - or put new ones in their place. Their litigation teams nearly overthrew an elected President. And, to maintain power, proclaimed Constitutionalists on the right, to this day, wage a concerted counter- revolution against such Constitutional guarantees as free speech and separation of church and state.

Movement conservatism was a power tool formulated by scholars such as Irving Kristol, political organizers like the late Treasury Secretary William Simon, opinion molders and popularizers such as William F. Buckley, and a phalanx of think-tank operatives including Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich. A highly integrated front of activist organizations has been generously funded by the banking and oil money of the Mellon-Scaifes of Pittsburgh, the manufacturing fortunes of Lynde and Harry Bradley of Milwaukee, the energy revenues of the Koch family of Kansas, the chemical profits of John M. Olin of New York, the Vicks patent-medicine empire of the Smith Richardson family of Greensboro, N.C., and the brewing assets of the Coors dynasty of Colorado, and others.

Their grants have paid for a veritable constellation of think tanks, pressure groups, special-interest foundations, litigation centers, scholarly research and funding endowments, publishing and TV production houses, media attack operations, political consultancies, polling mills, and public-relations operations. The concerted campaigns they run, also underwritten by such self-interested corporations as those in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and finance, have weakened the AARP, the Food and Drug Administration, Head Start, Medicare, and welfare programs.

[Gabi Hayes]

7. note the Koch family......does that name ring a bell?

it should

[JHB]

6. No, it was before that...

The media had been predominantly Eastern Establishment, which conservatives in the South and West equated with "liberal".
The label grew during conservative losses like the fall of Joe McCarthy, the Goldwater campaigns, and the Civil Rights Movement.
By the Nixon presidency, the term was moving out of the whacky fringes of the conservative movement and into their everyday language.

[rman]

9. You skipped a step in your explanation,

though you elude to it in your last paragraph.


"for the media to show the world how crooked the Nixon administration was and BANG,"

the RW came out in force to label the media as having a Liberal Bias,

which was repeated over and over (in part by those same 'liberal' media - how odd), until it stuck in the public mind.

You're probably right in that the defeat of Nixon was a major reason for the RW to increase their efforts to "do something about the media".

[HawkerHurricane]

10. For telling the truth about Goldwater...

Remember this: to a conservative, 'Fair' means you never say anything bad about a conservative; 'balanced' means every time you say something that might be bad a conservative must come on and tell you why it's not.