In the late 1950s and early 1960s, white Southerners grew resentful toward national journalists who covered the movement, whom they saw as advocating desegregation. The idea of liberal media stemmed from the Civil Rights movement, as researcher David Greenberg argues: Think of religion’s creation myth, or even the George-Washington-could-not-tell-a-lie myth myths used to rally around. In all of these respects, DC remains overwhelmingly wired for the GOP. Which are old-fashioned, which are ‘cutting edge’ and so forth. You build up a set of assumptions about what kinds of people and ideas are respectable and which aren’t. But a generation of one party holding the reins selects for certain kinds of journalists in key positions of power, the policy experts at the think tanks who get the journalists calls, the lobbyists who move the most money and so forth. Most of all Washington is a city that coddles up to and worships power. That conditions a generation of people with mindsets based around Republicans being the party of power, the party whose ideas get vindicated at the polls. But at least thirty, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. By some measures you could say forty years. We’re coming off of, or at least we’ve had a period of (because who knows about the future) thirty plus years of conservative dominance of Washington. This is part of what Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall called in 2009 “wired.” As in, Washington, D.C. One of the most useful myths the American political right has created and wrapped itself up in has been this notion of the “liberal media.” Just by proclaiming that the media is liberal pushes news organizations to trip over themselves to not appear to be liberal.
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