Hard Lessons from MoveOn Fiasco, by Robert Parry

[rusty quoin]

After the Right starts one of its cascading campaigns of outrage, the mainstream news media sees little choice but to report on what’s already so widely disseminated that it’s crossed a threshold of “what’s news.” Indeed, mainstream journalists risk being accused of “liberal bias” if they don’t start writing about what the Right has gotten everyone talking about.

So, the MoveOn fiasco becomes a front-page story pushing aside more significant information about brutal ethnic cleansing in Iraq occurring under the eyes of Gen. Petraeus's forces or evidence that President Bush is transforming U.S. Special Forces units into “death squads."
...

By contrast, one only needs to contemplate what would happen if Democrats dared sponsor a resolution denouncing abrasive right-wing commentators by name for bandying about the actual charge of “treason” against Iraq War critics, including people such as Scott Ritter who served in the military.

The Republicans and the Right’s media machine surely would howl about censorship and the importance of the First Amendment. But the maintenance of this double standard is guaranteed by the remarkable power of the Right's media infrastructure versus the virtual absence of one on the Left.

Read full story here:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/092207.htm

[msongs]

1. thank gosh NO democrats voted to condemn the ad lolololol :-) nt

[rodeodance]

2. so, the MSM is afraid of the howling of the RW also.

[depakid]

3. They're afraid of the excutives and their senior "news" editors

who are overwhelmingly Republican.

[sandnsea]

4. Hillary is on 5 networks at once

Our message is exactly what the Dem leadership wants it to be.

[frogcycle]

5. perhaps what is needed is a full-court press

get a bunch of "dirty hippies" to demonstrate everywhere, calling everyone all sorts of shit. they''ll be so busy mounting campaigns of outrage they'll think its whack-a-mole. and the audience will tire of it.


maybe a lot of overt accusations of crimes against humanity -
billboards with pics of gwb and dead iraqi children

hell, I am benumbed by their shit - what goes around comes around


or is it "what comes around goes around"

or "who runs aground buys a round"


egad i love painkillers!

[AX10]

6. Our wealthy liberals are too busy to invest in an infrastructure...

to counter the right wing noise machine.

[madfloridian]

7. The hard lesson was fear.

Our party is unable to do effective things for fear of being attacked. We either overcome that fear or we gradually become Republicans.