The media has turned.

I must start with some measured criticism, then I will move on to the primary focus of this rant, the outright bias of the corporate MSM.

What were so many here thinking?  Seriously, what the hell made so many label anyone, no matter how pro-Obama they were, as concern trolls simply for stating that the Wright issue was problematic?

So many seemed to have put so much faith in Obama and his organization to move past this quickly, and what Obama did was extraordinary compared to other Democratic responses to similar attacks in the past.  Most Democrats, Gore, Dean, Kerry, etc, just rolled over and died when the sound machine got rolling against them.  He played it perfectly, both politically and intellectually.  And the results?  Certainly mixed.  

While there are lots of positive stories about newly opened dialogue, there are numbers that do not lie and tell a different.  But most importantly, as we can see with numerous diaries since The Speech, the corporate MSM is again lying with dogs.  If you weren't concerned before tonight, seeing CNN give a teaser about putting Wright into context, then inviting Baye Buchanan and die hard Republican/Obama basher until the Wright issue Roland what's his name, to give us that context.

Did some of you just fall of the turnip truck?  Is this the first Presidential election you have seen in this country?  Did you not see that the facts of the matter regarding Wright were irrelevant?  Did the relative fairness in the way things were covered while both the D and R nominations were still up in the air really make you so complacent as to believe that the media would ride this for everything it is worth?

I think the media did a fairly good job for the better duration of this campaign.  They tampered down the anti-Hillary rhetoric after Media Matters and DK went after Matthews for his Hillary attacks.  They labeled 9ui11iani as he should have been labeled.  They covered the internal splits of both parties.  They beat down the Madrassa nonsense.  Hell, they even reported reality as it related to the FISA issue.  But we all should have seen the tide change, and we all know when it did change.

The entire direction of this campaign and the media changed directions on February 21, 2008, when the broadcast networks decided, in a seemingly coordinated effort, that John McCain's improper contacts with lobbyints was really a story about how unfair the media is to John McCain, and the only perspectives anyone watching should get is the Republican perspective.  

Suddenly, the media was not captivated by the titillation and sensationalism of sex and became big media critics.  How long did that last?  They are blind to the angle of the Wright controversy being far more of a media hitjob than the McCain article.  They seemed to only play media critic when playing media critic benefited the Republicans.  And as will be discussed, they only care about sex when it involves a Republican engaging in homosexuality, or a Democrat.

But the fact is, nobody should have to look back a month and contrast what happened in the coverage of these two stories for this perspective.  On February 19, Obama won Wisconsin and Hawaii.  We were all quite excited, and the narrative in the corporate MSM was that Hillary was done.  Then the NYT article came out, and that night we were ecstatic.  But that very night the one sidedness of the broadcast network coverage was palpable.  One really needs to go back to the run up to the war to see a comparable example of one-sided perspective, accept now the NYT had NO credibility.  Just a bunch of lefty hacks, don't you know.

Now perhaps you didn't see the turn with the McCain/NYT story, but you damn well should have seen it after March 4.  Suddenly, the narrative was no longer 'Hillary is done.'  Why?  Because we just dealt with a week of the 'the media gives Obama a pass' narrative.  Suddenly the frame was, despite moving the goalposts on Ohio and Texas several times to define what would be a Hillary victory, Hillary's firewall worked, and she's still in the race.  A week later, Hillary was smoked in two more primaries, and she came out just as strong and still in a position to win according to the media narrative.  At this point it was clear that the media was following it's own narratives.  Creating news, or letting biased sources create frames, instead of reporting news and analyzing it fairly and objectively.

But there was not time for the media to actually tease the 'Obama's lead is insurmountable' issue out until the Politico article diaried here tonight, because it was time to talk about prostitutes.  Now if you didn't recognize how the media had turned by this point, you should have recognized it by contrasting the way Spitzer's whoring was covered when compared to Vitters whoring.  It was night and day.  

The media was all aghast at the hypocrisy of Spitzer because he was an anti-crime crusader.  Sure I suppose a tangential argument regarding hypocrisy could be made there.  But the complete and utter hypocrisy of Vitters should have been a narrative until the man left office.  Instead, the media chuckles away Vitters absurd argument that the situations are distinguished because his only critics are only critical of his position on immigration, if they covered this bullshit at all.

Then Wright broke, and so many spent so much energy flaming so many others simply for hypothesizing that this is a narrative that will be tough to beat back.  Shame on you.  Shame on you not only for your flames, but for your failure to learn previous lessons and to recognize that the media has turned, and we are in another fight like 2000 and 2004.  Fighting back non issues, myth, disengenous framing and spin, lack of context.  Fighting tooth and nail to get someone in the corporate MSM to recognize that McCain's fundamental misunderstanding of something as basic as the differences between Sunni and Shia is a huge fucking issue.  Just before the McCain article, we were gaining traction.  McCain was having a difficult time remaining in the saddle of the Straight Talk Express.  His flip flops and pandering were making the news.  Then February 21 happened, or more than likely the Feb 19 primaries happened and the corporate MSM woke up and realized that Obama was going to be President if they didn't do something about it, and everything changed.

I am fully aware that this has been covered in numerous diaries before, but we truly need a coordinated effort to deal with this.  I do not have the know how or the skills to get it organized and up and running, but the only way the media is going to hear our voices and concerns over their blatant Republican bias is to hit them in the pocket book.  Mediamatters and other media critique websites, HP, Kos, and other blogs are great, but let's face it, they only speak to us, and the corporate MSM doesn't give a fuck what they/we say.  Being large corporate conglomerations, they care about dollars and they like employees that tow the corporate line, which generally coincides with the Republican line.

We need a short and long term coordinated effort.  Obama can hope that he's going to change politics, but the media is in love with the profits of the old way of politics, so it's an uphill battle.  We truly need a central location listing sponsors of all these journalistic hacks and a coordinated boycott of their products, letter writing campaigns included, just like the right wing originally cowed the media via coordinated letter writing campaigns.  We need to let these whores know that we will be getting our news from Amy Goodman, and are only watching/reading/listening to them to keep tabs on their spin and to call them out on their bullshit.  We need young people getting into newsrooms and networking with each other about navagating around their corporate editors and getting real journalism back into the listening range of most Americans.

We need our spokespersons, elected officials and surrogates, fighting for airtime, and calling out the networks when they refuse to provide balance by silencing their voice.  We need proper frames and proper language.  We need the American populace to hear "mother fucker" when someone says "conservative" the way they currently hear "tax and spend commie" when someone says "liberal."  While our very nature as progressives leads us down separate paths and individual thought, we need coalitions of websites and organizations.  We need the several paths that are being taken to be coordinated.  We need a sound machine.  

In short, we need to follow Republican tactics.  No, not Rovian tactics, but the type of meaningful grassroots efforts that allowed a relatively small group of Americans to become the loudest voices in American media and politics with lies and fear.  We need a Ralph Reed style coordination, without the corruption.  DK is awesome, but we're not a sound machine yet, and the majority of America still tunes into the idiot box or right wing media to get 'educated.'  We now see how they have been educated about Rev. Wright.  No matter how mellow the corporate MSM may seem from time to time, nothing has changed since Willy Horton, and nothing will change until their bullshit is so exposed they need to start reporting truth just to save face.