“How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backward to Please the Right” is a panel about, well, exactly what you’d think it’s about. Prefaced on panelist Rick Pearlstein‘s new book Nixonland, it posits that Nixon used media coverage of the infamous 1968 Chicago convention riots – and identification with the cops, rather than the protestors, in conservative quarters – to bludgeon the press into abdicating its role by browbeating it with charges of liberal bias.
As the sole MSM journalist on the blogger-heavy panel, the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman had some insight. “There’s a stress in the commentariat that you’re supposed to be counterintuitive … saying something people won’t expect,” he says. But that only goes as far as “Bush isn’t as bad on the environment as you think,” not, say, a less alarmist take on social security.
“A lot of journalists basically trimmed their sails,” in response to Republican pushback – a dynamic which may be changing now with the netroots push back too.
This article appears in July 18 • 2008.