In early 2006, Media Matters released an special report called “If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: an Analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 – 2005,” which thoroughly debunked the ridiculous “Liberal Media” charge by empirically demonstrating the imbalance of Rightwing guests (politicians, pundits and journalists) dominating the Sunday morning network news shows in almost all of those years. They found, for example, that “In every year examined by the study — 1997 – 2005 — more panels tilted right (a greater number of Republicans/conservatives than Democrats/progressives) than tilted left. In some years, there were two, three, or even four times as many right-titled panels as left-tilted panels.”
The excuse the networks offered in response was, essentially, that there was a Republican administration in the White House and Republican majorities in Congress for most of those years, so, naturally, there would be more Republican guests. And also, we were “at war.” Or something.
One year later, Media Matters followed up with “If It’s Sunday, It’s Still Conservative: How the Right Continues to Dominate the Sunday Talk Shows,” a follow-up “analysis of more than 2,000 guest appearances on the Sunday Talk shows in 2005 and 2006.” Unsurprisingly, they found that while there was marginal improvement since their previous report, little had changed the Rightwing tilt of the Sunday news shows, even after the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress in November of 2006. The media excuses, again, were pathetic.
And now, in response to the news that the Democratic President Obama’s Democratic administration killed Osama bin Laden the week before, there was this on this week’s Sunday news shows…
If it’s Sunday, it’s still Republicans — over both our public airwaves, as well as cable news — and the myth of a “Liberal Media” remains as mythical as ever.
We are well into the evolution of a new species of government in the USA aren’t we?
I call it the evolution from democracy to wartocracy.