The Daschle Rant

Trying to find a non-Democrat scapegoat for the Democrat degüello of two weeks ago, lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Daschle has been lashing out at conservative-dominated Talk Radio. It's gratifying to see talk radio lashing back.

Now, I've always been amazed to read/hear liberals complaining about "conservative-dominated media". Greens might be able to make this claim with a straight face - to a Green, Peter Jennings probably is legitimately pretty conservative. But I'm trying to remember the last time I heard a major media outlet other than Fox News coming down on the right side of gun control, abortion, foreign policy, welfare reform, taxes...

A reader writes:

After being frozen out of the Big Media, the Right proceeded to build alternate means to spread its message. The first area was AM radio. Ostensibly a dead medium 20, 30 years ago, unapologetically conservatively biased talk shows took off. The fortunate arrival of the talented conservative entertainer, Rush Limnbaugh, accelerated this build-up, but it was due to happen anyway. There was a market.

The Left, being at best somewhat suspicious of markets, has reacted to this trend by invoking bogus Equal Time requests and generally whining.

I don't know if this is at all a significant realization on my part, but I thought it was interesting. It may not even be unique, which means that someone else may have said it better than I.

Well, there is nothing new under the sun, but it's a very good point. The left has near-full control of the major commercial and public media with regard to editorial stances and coverage spin of the issues that matter to most people: pocketbook and simple policy.

Now that we, the right in all of our mind-blowing diversity, have built an alternate, samizdat media culture of our own, suddenly the left is concerned about media bias?

Posted by Mitch at November 22, 2002 10:23 AM