Artificial Christmas tree

Liberal media bias is a bullshit article of faith not representative of the real world. It's evergreen because it's fake.

A survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which focused on the first two weeks of February 2003, found that of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war, just 17 percent of them expressed skepticism about the looming invasion. This at a time when polling showed that approximately 50 percent of Americans had doubts about the planned war. And according to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department. Just 8 percent of the television news reports were of independent origin.

The fundamental source of existential danger to the American republic is the hardy ability of a large portion of the population to believe obvious lies.

(h/t Atrios)

Covering the coverage

Since the media is only interesting in self-examination to the extent that Howard Kurtz practices it, which is to say in the prurient and titillated way that frat boys are interested in breast self-examination, most modern coverage of politics is more about covering us in bullshit than in uncovering us from bullshit.

Celebrity journalists defend themselves and their cohorts from any accountability, at least by going along with the bullshit, often by generating more. If they didn't, they wouldn't get admitted to the fraternal order of the vacuous that leads to ever more visible televised inanity.

Eric Boehlert, along with stalwarts Eric Alterman and Bob Somerby, has been diverting rivers into the fetid barns of the media for some time. I've echoed the themes of all three from time to time, for example here, here, and here.

In the last several years, all three have written important posts (and books). Yesterday's post from Boehlert is one of them. It's a deft encapsulation of the insane consequences for our politics of irresponsibility in journalism.

Even the liberal media

More evidence that the media does indeed host political bias, though not of course the bias that conservatives raise to explain any story they don't like. If you need more, here it is.

(h/t Atrios)