Brent Bozell during a discussion on William F. Buckley Jr.'s book The Reagan I Knew on C-SPAN's Book TV opining over the state of the media today and wondering if William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan would have had their voices heard in today's television media. He makes the huge stretch of comparing Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on cable news today to Walter Cronkite, David Frost and Merv Griffin, like they had the same audience.
While I completely agree with Bozell that way too many on the cable news networks are forced to come on television and try to make a point in two minute sound bytes and that does nothing to add to any real political discourse in this country, him using that pretense to say that either Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley Jr. would not have had their opinions propogated by our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" is a complete joke.
Other than Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann we don't have any progressives controlling the narrative out there... period, on any of the cable news networks or on the big three. We have sorry milk toast excuses for surrogates that supposedly represent the "liberal" side of an issue and the Democrats apparently have not gotten the message yet that the press is not their friend. When they decide to break up these media monopolies that are controlling everything we watch and listen to I'll feel that maybe they have started to get a clue.
I had a conversation with a friend that I sadly found out liked Sean Hannity recently. It made me wonder how much time I wanted to spend with her in the future since it is hard to have sane conversations with someone who's basically been brainwashed, but at least we had an honest dialog that evening about where this country is headed and she answered a question I had for her about how many progressives she even knew existed.
She had no idea who Amy Goodman or Bill Moyers were, and she had no clue that any of the major much less lesser read liberal blogs out there even existed. I named a bunch of them off and let her know that if she didn't know who those people were she actually had no idea what the other side of the story was, and what an alternative view point to Sean Hannity was.
Brent Bozell may not be happy that the conservatives of our time actually have a couple people out there taking them to task on the TV machine as Rachel puts it, but to try to pretend that conservatives haven't had a chance to put their narrative out there because Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been allowed to be on the air on MSNBC is an utter and complete joke. And comparing them to anyone who anchored a major news network when that's all the public had to watch at the time during the era of Cronkite is an even bigger joke.
