Londoner opined:
"This is why there is never a pro-union story on any network".
Obviously, Londoner never watched the "Ed Show" on MSNBC.
I will waste no more time and effort to show the utter worthlessness of his opinion until he actually does, at least once, any given weekday evening at 9:00 PM ET., except Friday, when MSNBC drops its usual Republican bashing format and programs and switches to showing future residences of well deserving Democrats.
Noted. Again, the point I was making is that there is one block of Liberal commentators in media, concentrated on one network, in the evening.
I think you are missing my primary point. The mass media is owned by large corporations who are diametrically opposed to the Liberals who want to raise their taxes.
When MSNBC created its Liberal Prime Time block, it was owned by GE.
GE is the primary driver behind the American Legislative Exchange Council. The council's primary agenda is to weaken environmental legislation... Support school privatization ... Undercut health care reform ... Defund unions and limit their political influence ... Fund primary challenges against any legislator who does not support the party line on taxes and regulations ... Make it harder for minority, elderly and students to vote ... Weaken anti-trust legislation against Health Care monopolies, making it easier for them to raise premiums without being disciplined by market competition.
Keith Olbermann was fired when NBC was sold to Comcast because a few Comcast execs thought he was too anti-business and too anti-Conservative. [They started by asking him to "tone it down", which was a mistake because Olbermann is notoriously stubborn]
Since NBC delivers mass amounts of Blue State viewers to advertisers, they needed to replace Olbermann with a Liberal. So they hired ED, who has a midwestern, gee-whiz, salt-of-the-earth tone. His support of unions has the edge of a soggy stool. He is more harmless than Jimmy Carter but with 1/2 the IQ. But your point is taken.
However, it's not merely that big media (i.e., big
corporations) opposes the tax and regulatory policies of the Left. There was a larger shift inside the Left which peaked with Clinton, a shameless opportunist if there ever was one. In order to consolidate the growing consensus for smaller government (represented by the Reagan Revolution and the historic GOP capture of the House), Clinton declared in his State of the Union Address that the era of Big Government was over. He also screwed Labor with NAFTA and pivoted hard to Wall Street donations. He handed his fiscal policy to severe Friedmenite and Free Marketeer Richard Rubin, who completed Reagan's dream of fiscal deregulation (thus moving power form Washington to the private sector). That is to say, Clinton undercut the rhetorical and ideological support for Big Government. Granted, this support started to weaken with Kennedy, who lowered taxes, and then Carter, who deregulated Communications and Transportation. However, the postwar New Deal Consensus that fed Liberal Media Bias for so long was severely weakened by the Reagan Revolution, which literally changed public opinion about the competence of Government. And let's not forget Vietnam, which caused the Left to "drop out" and oppose their Washington leaders "Hey, Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill today" - or Watergate, which helped America realize that the Government who defeated the Nazis and put a man on the moon had taken a corrupt turn.
That is, to some extent, trust in Government has been dying for a long time - and with it the larger public consensus for Big Government. As the public consensus changes, news content (which is really just a vehicle to deliver advertisers to viewers) also changes. This is why we see fewer pro labor stories today than we saw in 1945. Also, Big Business, once the ire of Teddy Roosevelt Populism, has been slowly consolidating its power over Government/Media. Today, the only people who keep the myth of the Old Left alive are on the Right. They act like we're still living in Ayn Rand's world where Stalin steals your family's pharmacy. The rest of us know better. We now live in a world where Big Pharma - by funding elections and massive Lobbying - owns government. Until you recognize this basic shift, it will probably be hard for us to have a discussion without retreating to simplifications and straw men. My personal opinion is that if there was a genuine Liberal Media Bias, than we would see more criticism of the corporations who own media, specifically we would see more "hard hitting" stories about the negative influence of corporate money in politics. I'd love to see more stories about how regulatory capture and election funding do more to destroy competition than FDR Brownshirts. If there was more Liberal influence in media we'd see front page stories about Eli Lilly's behavior during the 2003 Drug Bill. The fact that nobody knows this story speaks volumes about who owns the media. But, again, your point about Ed it taken.
