RATHER DISTORTED

I write this with a Reidel glass of Rosemount Merlot at the ready, toasting the forced departure of an individual who has infested America’s airwaves for 43 years – ever since he joined CBS News in 1962. I won’t be watching Dan Rather’s final broadcast this evening, just as I haven’t watched CBS News for many years. I’ll merely sip my merlot in gratitude for all those bloggers who exposed Rather’s Memogate and did him in. And my friend Brent Bozell.

This is a particularly apt occasion to make you aware of Brent’s book: Weapons of Mass Distortion : The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media . All conservatives chronically complain about liberal media bias, but almost twenty years ago, Brent decided to rigorously research and document it. Since 1986, Brent’s Media Research Center has been an invaluable source of liberal media exposure.

Brent has compiled a collection of the most egregious examples of liberal media bias in his book – and then goes on to conclude that the entire liberal media edifice is built on quicksand. It’s the inevitable fate of any monopoly when exposed to real competition. Remember when the only TV news was CBS-NBC-ABC? The first to break the monopoly was talk radio, epitomized by Rush Limbaugh. Then came Fox, then the Internet, and now the Blogosphere.

That explains the ratings meltdown of network news, and the overall loss of liberal media monopoly. But why was that monopoly liberal? Why has the mainstream media been so consistently anti-American instead of pro-American? You could, with a sufficiently long memory, point to a time when it seemed to be the opposite – say, during World War II. Yet even this is slippery ground.

Liberals loved World War II not simply because we were fighting the Nazis, but because Hitler had double-crossed his buddy Stalin. When the Hitler-Stalin Peace Pact was operative, liberals were hysterically against our supporting Britain against the Nazis. Once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and Stalin asked to be our ally, instantly the liberals became anti-Nazi warhawks.

Folks in the media have been liberal for a long time. The reason may lie in the way they relate to the world, which is through words. Words are abstractions, and the journalist’s world of abstractions can become more real than reality: Platonism is journalism’s occupational hazard. The ideal becomes the only thing of value to which the actual and the individual must be sacrificed. Particular live human beings do not count as much as abstractions of them, “the people,” “the poor,” “workers,” “women,” “minorities,” “society.” All Platonists end up on the Left.

Thus Dan Rather could still assert that it did not matter if the memos that killed his career were forged because he was sure that the story of Bush faking his Guard service was true: facts are only of value if they are in service of the liberal ideal, otherwise they don’t count.

So today we get to celebrate the demise of the Platonist monopoly that once dominated American media and does not any longer. Thanks for exposing the bias of that monopoly for all these years, Brent. After this evening, you and we all will have one less Weapon of Mass Distortion to worry about.