A classic from The New Yorker:
There is no real liberal or even just noncon counterpart to the radiocons, as we might as well call them. On (mostly) the FM dial, National Public Radio is an alternative but not an equivalent. NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” like “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” are carried on some six hundred stations, and their audience is roughly the size of El Rushbo’s—somewhere around fifteen million people per week. But these NPR programs are news-feature broadcasts; they adhere to the practices of journalistic professionalism, including the aspirational ideal of objectivity. Their sensibility may fairly be said to be “liberal” in the sense that liberal education is liberal—that is, open-minded and urbane, with a preference for empirical inquiry over dogmatic conclusion-mongering—but what little overt political commentary they offer hovers around the moderate middle. NPR’s local talk-show hosts tend to be more overtly liberal, but they are always polite about it. In contrast, Limbaugh and his scores of national and local imitators aggressively propagandize on behalf of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and the domestic and foreign policies of the Bush Administration, with a stream of faxes and e-mails from conservative think tanks and the Republican National Committee keeping the troops firmly on message. Neither NPR nor anyone else ever performed any such services for the Clinton Administration, and no one is doing so today on behalf of the beleaguered Democratic opposition.
This “Talk of the Town” piece by Hendrik Hertzberg suggests he neither listened to much Rush (“smug, angry, disdainful middle-aged [man]“?) or NPR (“moderate middle”) before writing his piece.