21 Years Later and Not a God Damn Thing Has Changed

The incredibly destructive "liberal media bias" lie is now old enough to have one kids of its own in college, and yet if you squint ever so slightly you could hardly tell whether this column --

CHAREN LEANS TOO FAR RIGHT AND FALLS ON HER FACE

-- is from 21 years ago or from yesterday.  Here are some bits and nibbles.

At least Mona Charen got this much right: ABC's Sunday morning show "This Week" will be a less lively and provocative show without William Kristol participating in its weekly roundtable.

Kristol, who edits the influential conservative magazine...

Getting rid of Kristol won't fix "This Week." Neither will such softball bookings as...

But Charen's column last week (syndicated in newspapers nationwide, including The Courant) positing liberal media bias as the reason for Kristol's departure is as ridiculously nonsensical as ABC's decision. She's so far right that she's dead wrong.

Charen's argument goes like this: Kristol and former White House wonderboy George Stephanopolous were hired by ABC at the same time to spice up...

Now conservatives have gotten more mileage out of the old "liberal media" canard than Scotland has gotten tourism dollars out of the Loch Ness monster myth. But a convenient myth is exactly what it is, and Charen's argument couldn't be more disingenuous...

Not until the second-to-last line of her column does Charen mention conservative George Will, who remains on the show...

Moreover, Charen's generalizations about the politics of Donaldson, Roberts and Stephanopolous are highly speculative at best.

Donaldson has a reputation as a liberal more because he came to prominence as a hostile, aggressive questioner of President Reagan...

Indeed, Donaldson is not so much a liberal voice as a loud voice. He's rarely insightful, rarely interesting and rarely correct...

As for Roberts, she's the daughter of the late, legendary back-room congressional leader Hale Boggs and the sister of big-time Washington lobbyist Tommy Boggs. She doesn't represent the left or the center as much as she does the establishment. Roberts is the voice of the inside-the-Beltway Georgetown dinner-party set. Her insights are just as banal as Donaldson's...

Even Stephanopolous is hardly a reliable liberal voice. If Roberts represents Washington insiders, Stephanopolous represents himself. The former Clinton adviser has been so terrified of being seen as a partisan pundit that he routinely pulls his punches during the roundtable segment.

He's more interested in carving out a career in journalism...than rolling up his sleeves and defending Clinton and the Democrats...

That's not liberal bias. It's bias in favor of safe, conventional opinion. It's also not particularly interesting TV.

Yet despite the way the conservative argument about media bias crumbles when examined, it persists because the right clings to it with such insistence...

And take note, Mona. The ubiquitous Kristol hardly disappeared. He didn't even miss a roundtable. Sunday morning found him opining on CBS's "Face the Nation."

That was from the Hartford Courant on January 4, 2000.  That's four days after the Y2K bug didn't take down Western civilization, one day before UFOs were credibly reported over Southern Illinois --

-- and eleven months before George W. Bush stole the 2000 election.

Consider all that has happened in the decades between then and now.

And then consider that, in all that time, absolutely nothing about the way the mainstream media continues to comprehensively fail the democracy which makes that media possible has changed in any substantive way at all.

Burn The Lifeboats