WP: "Media rage on the left...now matches that on the right."

[DeepModem Mom]

Thunder on the Left
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2006

In an online chat the other day, someone got mad at me for saying that there was as much anger toward the media on the left these days as there has always been on the right.

After all, haven't a couple of conservative bomb-throwers said that journalists should be tried, convicted, hung, shot and otherwise disrespected for spilling national security secrets?

True, and I haven't come across any liberal opinion-mongers wishing quite the same fate on card-carrying journalists. But let's not make the mistake of confusing the views of a few extremists with those of everyone on their side of the spectrum.

Trust me when I say that many liberals are really ticked off at the MSM, even though the nature of their criticism is very different from their rivals on the right. The anger that liberals feel over media coverage of President Bush and the war is tinged with deep disappointment over journalistic shortcomings and a hope, however vain, that things can be improved. Why aren't you on our side? The anger among conservatives is fed by decades of feeling that the MSM is a bastion of bias, and a sense of futility that things will ever change. Why can't we get an even break?

Now my view has been echoed, in no less liberal a journal than the Nation, by Lakshmi Chaudhry: "The media rage on the left--at least among those politically active online--now matches that on the right."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html

Link to The Nation, "Rage Against the MSMachine":

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060731/chaudhry

"...where the right-wing blogosphere accuses journalists of ideological bias, the progressive netroots view them as corrupt and compromised."