Could Somebody Please Explain to Jon Rapoport What the Media-Bias Argument Actually Is About?

For Pete’s sake, Rapoport: If you can’t join in the conversation with the grown-ups, it’s best not to say anything.

Writing in the Democrats’ corner at the L.A. Examiner, Rapoport argues — in the tired, familiar, much-responded-to, much-discredited vein — that the success of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators disproves the notion that there is a liberal bias in the media. The truth is almost exactly the opposite of that: Rush is popular in no small part because of the liberal bias of the “objective” media.

Let me restate this so that it can be understood easily by children and Democratic bloggers: The main conservative criticism of the media isn’t that there aren’t enough conservatives on the op-ed pages or in broadcast-opinion programming. The main conservative criticism is that those organs that present themselves as neutral, unbiased reporters of fact are, in practice, liberal advocacy organizations. Here we mean the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the major broadcast and cable news reports, &c. Citing a dozen opinion programs — Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, &al., — in response to that criticism suggests that Rapoport is insufficiently familiar with what’s actually being argued to respond to it with any kind of coherence. The Democrats deserve better bloggers.