MemeMachineGo!

Columbia Journalism Review ‘s review of What Liberal Media? offers an interesting history of the origins of the idea of the media’s liberal bias .

[At the 1968 Democratic National Convention,] perhaps a tenth of the protesters in their designated sites far from that hall were beaten by the rampaging Chicago police. That is well remembered. What is less well remembered is that one in five of the reporters and cameramen covering the event were sent to the hospital. At the convention site, Mike Wallace was socked in the jaw. There came a moment of extraordinary professional solidarity from the sachems of journalism in response. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Katharine Graham, Otis Chandler, executives from all three networks, and the editor in chief of Time jointly dispatched an unprecedented telegram to Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of streetside censorship of a story “the American public as a whole has a right to know about.”

Their response seemed to them merely common sense, a rallying point: they, after all, not Mr. Daley, were the trained, trusted experts on public opinion in this country. The police riot was clearly a travesty. “These,” Tom Wicker wrote, “were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up.” Who could disagree?

The guardians of public opinion were mistaken in their every assumption. For America did not see Chicago as Tom Wicker did; it saw it as Mayor Daley did. The bumper stickers showed it even before the polls: “We Support Mayor Daley and His Police.”

Huge majorities blamed the protesters for their own fate, though many also blamed the media — CBS received thousands of calls accusing them of hiring cops to beat up the kids. Newsies suddenly awoke to find themselves hated the way bosses were hated. And the media’s inward, anguished, bending over backward to not appear liberal, which Alterman describes so effectively in the present day, was born. Not untypical was The Washington Post’s retrospectively exonerating the police, allowing that, “of course” policemen should be agitated by (no kidding) men in beards. Richard Nixon rode resentment of the media all the way to the White House that year; and, in 1972, to the greatest landslide in American electoral history.

For more on the book, see Alterman’s article adapted from it and whatliberalmedia.com

(CJR link via Atrios)