Rightwingers Take Over The Media

This is getting ridiculous--the country has been treated to a couple of weeks of whining by leftwing commentators claiming that the national media have been infiltrated and taken over by rightwingers. First, Al Gore declared that a conservative "fifth column" has taken over the commanding heights of the national media. Earlier this week, one of the country's most reliably boring left-leaning columnists, E. J. Dionne, hilariously repeated this claim in the Washington Post.

The straw that broke this camel's back was the whining earlier this afternoon by "entertainment studies" USC professor Marty Kaplan who aped the complaint on Publc Radio's Marketplace program. Kaplan explained that rightwingers have been successful in taking over the media takeover because they are simplistic thinkers and thus can attract audiences. He even complained that conservatives dominate the internet--a place where any idiot can publish a website. It never occurs to Kaplan that subtle thinkers of complex thoughts like him are ignored by the unwashed masses because their policies have failed for a generation and the public no longer feels like being condescended to by superior intellects like Kaplan.

The leftwingers evidence that conservatives now dominate the media?--Fox News now attracts more viewers than CNN, Rush Limbaugh is the king of talk radio, and the Washinton Times has over 100,000 subscribers. As Atlantic editor and columnist Michael Kelly points out, that "brilliant" analysis overlooks the fact that news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and NPR, just to name a few, have not yet noticably succumbed to Al Gore's conservative "fifth column."

Leftwing commentators like Kaplan and Dionne simply can't face the fact the public is weary of their divisive appeals to identity politics incoherently combined with their kneejerk egalitarianism. Anyway, Gore, Dionne, and Kaplan should just relax, polls show that 60% of reporters and editors still lean to the Democratic Party while only 15% lean toward the Republican Party. Of course, in my unbiased opinion, what Americans, who are increasingly socially liberal and economically conservative, really need are more libertarian journalists.