One neat trick the Right perfected over the last generation has been the manipulation of the media.
A founding principle of the Nixon Thesis is "the liberal media." Any criticism, on anything from any quarter gets this immediate response from the conservative grassroots. "You're part of the liberal media," followed by a prompt dismissal of the critic.
It's a great dodge, this victim game. It means you never need answer a critic. They're biased. They're the enemy. And you can spread this word among your acolytes, so they too are inoculated.
Once inoculated in this way people become sheep. Nothing that contradicts you can ever get to them.
To this has been added the control and ownership of the media. The best know conservative media baron is Rupert Murdoch, who now has immense sway over the politics of Australia, Britain and the U.S. through his ownership of newspapers, magazines, TV and cable, and Web sites. A better example might be Silvio Berlusconi, who used his control of Italy's media to make himself ruler of all Italy.
To these conservatives the equation is pretty simple. Own the media and you control the people. Grab them by the clickers and their hearts and minds will follow. Politics is not a contest of ideas. It is a contest of wills, and money. With enough of both you can make people believe anything you want.
Liberals have never really gotten their heads around this. It's one thing to deal with a media that is owned by people who vote conservative. It's another thing entirely to face a conservative media, a media where no voices other than conservatives ones get a hearing, where no facts other than those conservatives approve of can be known.
Murdoch is not alone. Pat Robertson controls a large hunk of the media. Sun Myung Moon controls another hunk. There have long been regional conservative barons in various parts of the country — Freedom Newspapers in California, Morris Communications in Georgia. The dominance of these companies within their markets mean liberal causes, liberal politicians, and liberal organizations start off with an immense disadvantage.
But at least these organizations pretend to exist in the market.
This is not true for the latest "media baron," Philip Anschutz. Anschutz started like many other conservative "success stories," with inherited money. As a big landowner he got lucky — they found oil there. He has since been involved in railroads, and he is the chief reason we have soccer in this country.
What makes Anschutz dangerous to democracy is that his media ownership grows directly out of his right-wing Christian politics. He has greenlighted overtly and covertly Christian films through his ownership of major theater chains. He is (surprising for an oil man) in denial about evolution. He is highly secretive, and dedicated to pushing a right-wing conservative agenda on Americans.
The Anschutz media plan has nothing to do with making money. It has everything to do with political control of you.
It's imperative that his moves be seen with more than a jaundiced eye. He is not engaging in journalism or media ownership, but politics.
Anschutz started this effort with money-losing papers in San Francisco, Baltimore and Washington, all called the Examiner, that he eventually closed (after he couldn't give them away) and turned into a Web effort called The Examiner.
There, by buying up a micro-blogging site called NowPublic, he has conned some blogging wannabes into a pay-per-click business model (that somehow never pans out for them) as a cover for some big-time Wingnut Welfare, hiring right-wing garbage from everywhere and calling them "an editorial staff." He has also hired some people to maintain the cover story that he's doing journalism, as in this example.
What is most important to understand is the difference between real journalism and the Astroturf journalism being practiced here by Phil Anschutz. Real journalism has to answer to the market. If no one watches CBS, or reads ZDNet, I'm out of business. Sites like DailyKos and TPM have to monetize their traffic in order to pay salaries. Astro-journalism needs only wingnut welfare to survive. It is entirely a creation of politics, a front no different than the so-called "grassroots" groups created by health insurance companies to protest health reform.
In fact this is all of a piece. Conservatives have come to believe we are controlled by politics and media. This is at the heart of the Nixon Thesis. These seem like big businesses but compared to the whole — compared to even that portion controlled by right-wing a-holes like Anschutz — they are very small. To Anschutz, what we think, and how we react to it, are commodities to be bought-and-sold. We are sheep the masters will control by running the sheepdog and paying the cowboys.
You need to think about this next time you see, on TV, some so-called "journalist" identified as being with The Examiner.
That person is not a journalist. They do not cover news. They work to create it. They are paid to show you little baubles and control your mind, not to ferret out the truth. You can know this because they are not creatures of the market.
That's the key. Real journalists respond to the market. Astro-journalists have no need for it. This is what makes them dangerous. They are not bound by gravity like the rest of us.
