Les Jones

Remember when uber-liberal Michael Stipe wrote "CBS-TV tells a million lies...I'm just so profoundly frustrated by this, so f**k you, Dan"? It's in the song "Ignoreland" from 1992. Liberals have despised Rather for years, not so much for doing a crappy job with what CBS does cover, but for all the stories CBS refuses to cover.

If you've ever had a subscription to The Nation, you know how absurd the notion is that the big corporate media is liberal. Actual liberal news looks nothing like TV news, no matter what network. There's definitely overlap between actual liberal media and the Washington Post and Boston Globe and New York Times, but those papers also have big overlaps with conservative media, because they strive to cover everything.

Keep in mind that CBS refused to air a MoveOn.org ad during last year's Super Bowl. The media is only as liberal as the big corporations that own them. Dan Rather was owned. Most of us, left or right, want the truth. Corporations are not so high-minded. They like to control information, and Dan Rather worked for them.

Except that Rather's stablemate, Andy Rooney, also thinks Rather is liberal:

Andy Rooney on Larry King Live in June of 2002 may have been the first when he said, "I'm consistently liberal in my opinions," and that he considers Dan Rather to be "transparently liberal." (Rooney's quotes later framed Goldberg's introduction to Arrogance, his 2003 book.)

Liberal/conservative is a pretty poor descriptor. If I believe Americans should be able to buy guns and abortions, where am I? I think there is another important axis, individualist/corporatist. American tradition is clearly individualist, but corporations have seized power in the past century or so. To me, that battle is far more important than most of the wedge issues used to divide us into liberal/conservative. I feel like I have more in common with conservative individualists than with liberal corporatists like Dan Rather.

One of the reasons the left appears so incoherent is because most liberals view global, corporate interests as their primary opponent, but when elections come around, their candidate is almost always a corporatist, and campaigns hinge on issues that have little to do with defending the rights and power of individuals from corporations. The media does its best to drive liberal and conservative individualists out of the race and marginalize their issues. After that, they don't much care which flavor of corporatist wins.