Gotta Love the Right’s Liberal Media Conspiracy Theory

I think you have to hand it to the American conservative movement for how brilliantly they’ve played the refs over the years. The belief that the corporate media is hopelessly biased towards the left is as powerful as any religious doctrine, and they’ve managed to hector the media itself into buying it.

Earlier this week, I caught the WaPo’s media dude, Howie Kurtz, creating the Mother of False Equivalencies. Think Progress caught it too:

In an online chat earlier this week, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz defended Fox News’ conservative orientation by saying there is a “distinction” between Fox’s opinion shows and news programming. “Just as you have to make a distinction between The Post’s news pages and its left-leaning editorial page,” said Kurtz. As Jamison Foser pointed out at the time, the idea that the Post’s op-ed pages are “left-leaning” is laughable. As if to prove that point today, the Post’s op-ed page features columns by two former Bush speechwriters, “Obama’s biggest critic,” and a former National Review editor:

Business columnist Robert Samuelson also has a piece saying that the Obama administration’s “blunder” of pushing for health care reform has caused “business planning and the willingness to expand” to suffer. The print edition of the Post also has a short item from liberal Eugene Robinson. This isn’t the first time that the Post has loaded its op-ed page overwhelmingly with conservatives.

Let’s not forget their news pages, where you can find justification for all sorts of belligerent foreign policies, any treaty that has the words “free trade” in its title and of course endless scare stories about how “entitlements” are bankrupting the nation.

I’ve said before that most reporters and editors are educated urbanites, and like most educated urbanites, aren’t prone to buy into God, Guns and Gays politics. If you’re one of those troglodytes who thinks the Homofascists are trying to destroy America, I can see how the media would read left. But on security issues — the War on Terror — the economy and most other issues of substance their really shameful bias is towards the powerful, towards the conventional wisdom.