Sit, Ubu, Sit

The conservative media is getting a new watchdog, one who understands what makes the Fox Newses and New York Posts sniff around and whom they pee on. According to the New York Times, David Brock, the lambaster of Anita Hill who recanted his right-wing proclivities in a book (“Blinded by the Right”) several years ago, is setting up a website to “monitor the conservative media and correct erroneous assertions in real time.”

“Because a healthy democracy depends on public access to accurate and reliable information,” Brock writes on his site, “Media Matters for America is dedicated to alerting news outlets and consumers to conservative misinformation – wherever we find it, in every news cycle – and to spurring progressive activism based on standards and accountability in media.”

This is very welcome. As investigative reporter Joe Conason has pointed out in his must-read book, Big Lies, right-wing poop has sullied the minds of many of us to the point where otherwise intelligent Americans believe that only neofascist “conservatives”- who want to conserve nothing, but instead would hurl this nation's social policies back to the hair-dragging days of Og, the Caveman – offer any hope of saving the world from godless hordes. Brock is living proof that reactionaries, even reactionaries who once wrote the vilest stuff they knew to be lies, are redeemable.

But I would suggest that Brock, for all his endeavors, is sniffing around the wrong fire hydrant. He should be looking not at The Washington Times or his former colleagues at The American Spectator. We know they'll scrape off the thinnest scum under the tiniest rock to take down opponents of the radical right and the Bushcheney administration. So why on earth waste the millions of dollars the Times says has been contributed by wealthy liberals (an oxymoron if there ever were one)? Spend that cash wisely. Look not at your enemies, but at your “friends.”

Look closely at the so-called “liberal media.”

Yes, for Newt's sake, the Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and other so-called bastions of fair and objective reporting. They, not the Fox News pit bulls, were the junkyard dogs who slandered Al Gore in 2000 by shamelessly repeating Bushcheney campaign-fed lies like the veep claims he invented the Internet (he never said that). It was the “impeccably objective” Tim Russert, not Sean Hannity, who played “gotcha!” with Howard Dean when he interviewed the governor in June of '03 on NBC's Meet The Press. It was the Boston Globe, not Ann Coulter, who made a big deal over PreDemNom John Kerry being Irish or Jewish.

The Washington-based national press corps, claim critics such as Eric Alterman and Bob Somerby, are worthless, bloated millionaires who have snuggled into the beds of D.C. society and are loathe to afflict the comfortable, as is their industry's calling, because the press corps themselves are the comfortable. Manic about being exiled beyond the Beltway – in Washington, a calamity almost as bad as finding white powder in your junk mail is being marginalized – they gleefully lap up the dog food the radical right is terrific at slopping out. So Mike Dukakis frees rapists, Howard Dean is a dangerous nut, and John Kerry threw away his medals – no, ribbons – no, medals – no, ribbons.

Grrrowff!

David Brock can spy on the right-wing media all he wants from his plush offices on K Street, Northwest, and think he's doing journalism and the nation a favor. But if he really wanted to do something worthwhile, he would support terriers like Alterman and Somerby, who have sic'ed themselves on the so-called McGruffs of journalism and exposed them for the lapdogs they really are.