Your post is great. I remembered this article at FAIR...I thought of it once before this week. I have watched people on our sit there, and not speak up and defend our side. So many times it has happened.
This is a good article, and it has some very choice paragraphs in it. There are a few I don't agree with, and a few I could add. But it is quite good.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1969"Such debates, spanning the spectrum from A to B, are a television staple. But the narrowness of these pundit mismatches isn't random. Though such debate segments purport to pit right against left, centrist pundits are routinely substituted for the left on panels, while progressives are often excluded altogether. Debates matching conservatives with centrists are a cable television tic so pervasive that a small army of centrist pundits has formed whose motto might as well be, "I'm not a leftist but I play one on TV."
And this about Peter Beinart being cast as a liberal: ""Hot Topics" segment about Iraq War issues on News From CNN (4/20/04) found anchor Wolf Blitzer pitting pro-war conservative Armstrong Williams against... pro-war centrist Peter Beinart, the editor of the New Republic magazine. The two differed on subordinate issues, such as whether the White House was too close to the Saudis (Beinart said yes, Williams said no), but there was no disagreement on the legitimacy of the war or occupation."
And some no holds barred comments about the Crossfire picks on the left....hey, don't kill the messenger. "The center-right cable format was born in 1982 with the premiere of CNN 's Crossfire . Explicitly marketed as a primetime face-off between one host "from the right" and another "from the left," with corresponding guests from each side, Crossfire set the standard for debates pitting proxy progressives against committed conservatives (see Extra! , 7-8/90). The show's original hosts: from the right, arch-conservative presidential aide Pat Buchanan, and from the left, Tom Braden—whose CIA career included supervising covert operations against Western Europe's left.
Crossfire 's "from the left" job is currently shared by Democratic political consultants Paul Begala and James Carville. Though more combative than previous Crossfire hosts, the two are best known for directing Bill Clinton's centrist presidential campaign. Begala cheers his former boss for turning the party right, away from its traditional liberal base (Meet the Press , 4/11/99): "You know, Bill Clinton saved the Democratic Party with Al Gore by pulling us back to the center, by disagreeing with the liberals on welfare reform and on crime and on trade."
Carville has similar praise for Clinton's centrism (CNBC , 2/23/00): "What he did was a political feat that is unmatched in American political history. He moved the Democratic Party to the center... and kept the core Democratic voters."
Carville's client list raises even more questions about his qualifications as a progressive pundit. He served as a political gun-for-hire for conservative Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis in a losing 1993 campaign against socialist Andreas Papandreou (London Times , 10/30/93.) And Carville worked for the Venezuelan opposition in its recent failed attempt to oust President Hugo Chavez, a left-wing populist, in a recall referendum (New York Times , 4/18/04.)