The TalkShowization of the Mainstream Media
By Steve Young

Steve Young

Jan. 30, 2006 /HOLLYWOOD (apj.us)/ Saturday night, I moderated a California Progressive Caucus-sponsored panel of experts discussing withdrawal from Iraq and why it should happen much sooner rather than later.

The word "immediately" was heard often.

So was the truth.

What made this meet-up different from the usual call for get-out was that both Democratic and Republican voices were heard.

And unlike the blather that pollutes the cable news and right-wing radio airwaves, the speakers were armed with facts, not opinions.

How refreshing! We heard reality, not fabrication -- truth, not lies -- and evidence rather than dissemination of the sort of ignorance that talk radio/TV thrives upon, and which this administration has joyfully embraced.

What this administration calls "truth" ought to cause Truth to sue for irreparable damages.--- for example, when a federal study and our top general say that the military is stretched beyond its capabilities and a Secretary of Defense -- who admits he hasn't read the study -- says that's not true. Or when the Bush Department of Word-Mangling shifts the rationale for war from finding WMD to finding WMD-related activities. Or when Democrats can't be smeared for taking Abramoff donations (sometimes known as bribes), the burden of guilt widens to include Abramoff client-related donations.

Come to think of it, the word "related" should get a kickback from this White House.

We've let the talk show mentality bastardize the truth in a political shakedown of obscene proportions. We've stood by quietly, letting snake oil salesman like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh poison the debate under the guise of truth-telling, using circuitous arguments that are an insult to anyone with a single brain cell -- twisted logic so tortured that the Geneva Convention would object.

And that's not the worst of it: we've allowed the Right to bully the fourth estate into thinking political balance means that lies must get equal space with the truth.

Call it the TalkShowization of the mainstream media.

Under fear of being called biased by the biased Right, the Los Angeles Times gives the vicious David Horowitz ( http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Horowitz_(ex-Marxist) )space on the front page of the Sunday Op-Ed section. Right wing apologists like Max Boot (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Max_Boot) and Jonah Goldberg spread propaganda on the Times daily opinion pages while condescending blowhards like Dennis Prager and David Gelernter spit out their "Blame the Left for the death of Righteousness" rants under the pretense of speaking the word of God.

If there be a reason to believe there is no God, read Prager's divisive litanies and try to figure out why God hasn't struck the ever-pompous Prager columnless.

The bastion of liberal ink-think, the New York Times, releases NSA spying story after a year of collusion with the White House -- and ONLY because one of the own writers would have exposed it in his new book and made them even look less credible than, say, they allowed someone like Judy Miller to make them look -- and all to mask White House drive-to-war propaganda as news.

The Washington Post, once considered a governmental-double-talk-detector, lets their ombudsman distort the truth about who really took money from Jack Abramoff while Saint Bob Woodward goes mute on the sins of the administration.

The Today Show invites Bill O'Reilly to give us intellectual insight into the news.

CNN hires Bob Bennett.

Headline News, obviously forgetting the brilliant MSNBC Michael Savage experiment, brings on Glenn "Hate The 9/11 Families/Katrina Survivors Are Scumbags" Beck.

The supposed watchdogs for the public, the (excuse me while I wretch) liberal media -- except perhaps for NBC's David Gregory and absolute goddess, Helen Thomas -- have let us down. The rest of the White House "press corpse" sits back while Scott McClellan is allowed to stonewall with his favorite new phrase, "There is a serious investigation going on so we can't comment further."

If that's the truth, they'll never be able to comment on anything because everything this White House does needs serious investigation.

Every Sunday morning news talk show anchor Tim Russert defiles the legacy of conservative Lawrence Spivak and the young David Brinkley by posing debunked RNC talking points as if they're legitimate questions, and the guests let such outrages pass unchallenged. Just last week on Meet The Press, Senator Barack Obama fell into the right wing talking point trap by intimating that, with respect to the Abramoff scandal, "The problem of money in politics is bipartisan."

Senator, by conceding that, you only gave this TalkShowization of America credibility. Instead of letting Tim Russert or Brit Hume or George Stephanopolous or, God forbid, even a Hannity frame some RNC talking point in the context of an acceptable question and just responding it, the answer must begin with a complete dismissal of the question:

"[Insert 'moderator' name here], why would you take an already confirmed misrepresentation and hold it up as a legitimate question? Surely your crack research staff could have easily checked this out and found it to be wholly untrue long before you embarrassed yourself by asking it on your show. Next question."

So here's a memo to Howard Dean, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and everyone else: instead of reacting to some fiction that isn't worth valuable network time, call a lie a lie right from the get-go.

Then, you can spend that freed-up time selling America on the truth instead of letting the media sell America down the river.

Steve Young is a Senior Fellow at the Extreme Far Centrist Foundation' Political Husbandry Conservation Centre and Stereo Repair. In his spare time, he is also an author, comedy writer, columnist, LA talk show host and author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful."(What? You STILL haven't bought it? Then visit http://www.greatfailure.com/). You can also check out the satirical side of Steve every Sunday in the LA Daily News.