Howard Kurtz (who isn’t exactly known as a conservative or right-of-center source) has one message for Al Gore and President Obama: “Can we please stop the whining?”
For instance, when asked by Charlie Rose if there was “a very hostile environment for progressive ideas”, Gore blamed:
Fox News and right-wing talk radio. In Tennessee there’s an old saying if you see a turtle on a fence post you can be pretty sure it didn’t get there by itself. And the fact that we have 24/7 propaganda masquerading as news, it does have an impact.
First of all, think of just how close we were to having a president who uses idiot aphorisms like that.
Second of all, Gore is just bitter because he “started what he hoped would be a liberal counterweight in Current TV, spent millions on such stars as Keith Olbermann, and … the channel flopped.”
Then there’s President Obama, who recently proclaimed:
One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.
Kurtz responds:
But we’re talking here about the president of the United States. He has an army, a navy and a bunch of nuclear weapons, not to mention an ability to command the airwaves at a moment’s notice. And he’s complaining about a cable channel and a radio talk-show host?
And then he concludes:
What liberals sometimes forget is that the conservative media took root because many Americans felt the fourth estate was too left-wing. ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post all strive for fairness, in my view, but there is little question that they have a social and cultural outlook that leans to the left. Collectively, they have far more weight than Fox, talk radio and The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Right-wing pundits make a convenient foil, but at times Obama seems to magnify their importance. After all, he’s got the biggest bully pulpit of all.
Cleverly, Kurtz seems to dodge mentioning CNN. And you can see his bias in his scorched-earth indictment of their more-watched competitors:
There are times when many Fox programs, including in the nonopinion hours, appear to be on a jihad against the administration. And these days, MSNBC can be counted on to defend the Democrats almost around the clock.
But that bias of employer aside, when a member of the media generally sympathetic to your cause has to call you out for being hypersensitive…you’ve gone way too far. It’s clear that Al Gore and the President are first to blame the media for their failures, despite the fact that the media has “a social and cultural outlook that leans to the left” with “far more weight than Fox, talk radio, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page”.
One thing’s for sure: whining doesn’t fix the problems we face. And when we have leaders consumed with whining instead of problem solving, then they aren’t really leaders, are they?
