Cesspool Media Redux ...

IT SEEMS MY TRASH-TALKING rants get most of the attention on this blog; my better posts ... not so much. I feel bad for getting on Andrea's case a little too harshly, perhaps. This is why I don't watch her show; it's much too upsetting, at least for me, as an outside-the-beltway progressive looking in. But it's not personal.

Yesterday, after a dose of the Terrible 'Rs', Russert and Rendell, I'd just about had it. Shouldn't have watched Andrea at all, but the President was speaking. Unfortunately, Andrea trots out the despicable anti-woman, anti-ACA, anti-Obama troglodyte Cuccinelli to spout his unemcumbered wingnut LIES. That was just TOO MUCH.

As much as Andrea is a nice lady, she's an insider's Washington D.C. insider. Hence part of the Beltway Media problem. The same Media miasma which has programmed Luke Russert to spout the Left-Right false equivalency canard, while spending most of his time sucking up to Republicans in Congress. Russert is an automaton goner, who was conservative to begin with, and became completely indoctrinated in a surprisingly short timespan. The gravitational pull of the RIGHT on the Beltway Media is something that can only be fully appreciated from outside.

Russert has internalized the Beltway language, the narrative, the myths, the biases, in record time. It's sickening. Andrea, for her part, is a creature of Washington D.C., the ultimate Establishment city, corporatist and conservative, leaning heavily Republican, or Republican Lite, like Ed Rendell, which is as much as the MSNBC suits will tolerate, or Andrea can understand.

That's it in a nutshell. You might get Democratic equal time on her show, but it's the classic political conundrum of our time: Andrea feels obligated to give equal time to the Republican alchemists of the Flat Earth Society over the scientific community represented by the Democratic Party. In the process, she is doing great harm to the body politic. And as I've stated before, how incredibly condescending is it, to call upon Rachel each time liberals and progressives need to be "interpreted." Same as in Meet The Press, heavily Republican-leaning, as every statistic will show.

So yeah, if I've called them the MEDIA CESSPOOL it's because they've done enormous harm to our body politic. Not that they're the worst offenders. CNN and FOX are. But that they're supposed to represent the liberal and progressive voice, which is mainstream America most everywhere else but the Beltway, polling in the 60s on issue after progressive issue, from taxing the rich, to Social Security and Medicare, to individual provisions of the ACA.

Yet the corporate Beltway Media perpetuates the myth of conservative America. One wonders whether Andrea has considered the harm she does to the country, on a daily basis, to people's basic understanding of the issues, as she sits blithely and passively by, the proverbial potted plant with a front shelf view of Republican LIES. Every so often she'll praise one for not straying from "message discipline."

This isn't an idle critique. It's the same basic one proffered by Paul Krugman at CNBC, as he labeled them ZOMBIES. By the time we've seen the parade of Vin Weber (a favorite, typical Establishment Republican pal of Andrea's), Haley Barbour (racist, TRULY — he has a history with the Klan and uttered an anti-Semitic slur a month ago, whitewashed by Andrea), Ken Cuccinelli, et al ... we're not of a mind to put up with Chris Cillizza's anything-but "post-partisan" analysis. To the extent these people get caught out they'll temper their lingo; but a zebra's still a zebra.

And the worst part of it is, that MSNBC has deliberately mainstreamed Republican extremism.