I think you’re trading on the ambiguity in the term “liberal”. When folks complain of liberal media, they’re not decrying a media that’s free wheeling and encompasses lots of different views. Just the opposite actually. They’re decrying a media that is almost uniformly center left in their outlook.
To whom do you refer, the media or the RW?
If one has a right hand then their has to be a left. So when they say “right winger” shouldnt their also be an opposite like “left winger”? Yet how often do you hear terms like “leftist” or “left wing”?
They slam people in the Tea Party but what is the liberal equivalent that goes in the opposite direction?
I hear “ultra-conservative” but where is “ultra-liberal”?
What is the opposite of a “neo-con”?
Instead the media always portrays clearly far left positions as “progressive”.
This to me shows a liberal bias in the media.
Media journalists are typically liberal, so they color their news coverage to reflect their inherent bias.
That’s why, if you are a true conservative, your only option is one of the handful of prototypical “conservative” news outlets, which become a self-reinforcing echo chamber easily open to ridicule.
Huh. I hear leftist, ultra-liberal, left-wing all the time. I also hear terms like marxist and socialist thrown around. What would the opposite of this term be for the right? Fascist maybe?
Neo-con (neoconservatism) is a very specific political ideology with roots in the 70s and 80s. I don’t know that it has an opposite though it grew out of opposition of the Democratic policies of Lyndon Johnson.
For myself, I do think that some media outlets have a liberal bias, but only because they are trying to brand themselves and get a market niche. All media is struggling to make money and will do that however they can. I think promoting a political agenda (i.e. Fox News and MSNBC) is most likely secondary to this primary objective.
Well, that’s right back to “reality has a liberal bias”. It’s hardly the fault of the media that those people are simply* wrong.* Should the media just outright lie to be “fair”? Start making up support for positions like that that simply doesn’t exist? Evolution isn’t going to start being any less factual just because some people don’t like it.
Nowhere in America outside of tiny Internet sites, essentially. American politics go from right, to far right; there’s barely a middle, much less a left. The far right is a major force in America; the far left consists of a few bloggers and the like.
No; it shows that the far left does not have a significant presence in America. The media doesn’t report on it, because it isn’t there.
Oddly enough, I was reading something on al Jaz a while back where they referred to a person as being “neo-liberal”, which seemed to be more similar in description to neo-con (von Mises-like) than any kind of “liberal” ideology I was ever familiar with. I guess outside of the US, the poles get reversed (in Germany, the Greens have been described as “conservatives”, which has an underlying logical sense to it).
I’m going to make the obvious but inevitably controversial point that if you really don’t think there’s a far left in the US, then you’re saying much more about your personal politics then you’re saying about American politics.
Political positions are multidimensional, and an opposite might get you some strange mix that doesn’t exist. The result would be very dovish, maybe even to a America First degree, although that was a weird mix of far left, far right, and between. I’m not sure what the social politics would be. Paleoconservatives often exist as opposed to neoconservatives, but aren’t a true opposite.
No, Der Trihs made a perfectly valid and obvious point. Let me explain further.
If you were to do a distribution diagram of political positions in the US, with the conservative end on the right (of course) and the liberal end on the left, you might expect them to follow a standard bell curve format, with the highest number clustered about the center, and a decline on both sides until, as you approach “extreme right” and “extreme left” where you have only a few outliers.
Like this.
Now what Der Trihs is arguing is that the US has been moving to the right at a good clip since the 1980s, so much so that the entire range of political discourse has shifted far to the right. In fact, if you were to overlay, say, a bell curve representing political position in Europe vs. the US, you’d see the US bell curve almost entirely shift to the right, with just a tailing edge going past the center point on the political spectrum. Europeans, after all, have a fair representation of actual socialists, communists, etc. in their mix, whereas socialists and communists are almost entirely absent in American political discourse.
The best we have is progressives, who are NOT looking to replace capitalism with something else, just to regulate it so that the worst excesses of an unregulated free market system won’t visit themselves upon us. Or to provide some sort of social safety net for losers in the free market. Most progressives are solidly centrists in European terms.
You don’t understand this because you think the progressives represent the ultimate far end of leftist thought. We don’t, far from it. And that’s what we call “reality.”
There is not an equivalence between “science” and “religion”. Science is not a “belief”. It is a framework for approaching how the universe works through the methodical gathering of measurable and observable evidence. The nice thing about science is that it is subject to change in the face of new evidence. Religion does not require such scrutiny. Therefore religion has no place in scientific discussion and therefore does not require equal and balanced airtime with science in the same arena.
If you want to discuss religion as a philosophical exercise or as a framework for morality, that is a different matter.
Der Trihs did not say that there is not a far left in America, he said that its influence and visible presence is negligible.
Thing is, the “left” tends to be a lot more amorphous than the right. The further you go to the right, tighter and more rigid the ideology becomes. The left has always been more about things like tolerance and multiculturalism, so as you move left, the ideologies become more diffuse and varied. The RWs in their tirades are firing blindly at a target they cannot even see or understand.
That poster is no more qualified to comment on American centrism than George Bush on nuclear weapons capability.
He is the poster-boy for “everyone is a conservative if they don’t live on the outskirts of atheistic Marxism like I do.”
So a person on the “far left” is not qualified to talk about the “left” but a person on the right (who probably does not understand what “conservative” actually means) is?
nvm
To all who have responded to my earlier comment about the far left.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say those who took issue are no further right than center.
Take a person of the right, somebody in the vein of a Robert Taft. Not necessarily a politician, but somebody of a similar view.
He sees the NSA collecting bulk data on pretty much everyone. There’s scads of federal agencies that can’t be squared with a strict construction of the constitution. American military is scattered hither and yon doing things other than combating clear and present dangers. An individual can’t drive without a seat belt, go without health insurance, opt out of Social Security. Year by year the budget gets larger, while there is no serious talk of reducing it.
The fact that there are few avowed socialists or communists in congress is cold comfort.
The Military Industrial Complex is a pretty serious concern for the “left”, but the media overall rarely address it. Whenever a military-type conflict flares up, the press are either devoid of critical comment or are actively rallying behind the military action. It is really awesome, for them, to be covering this like a sport, showing Americans how our big store of weapons is performing so effectively. This does not suggest a “liberal” media.
Or that like most Americans you have no real idea what an actual far left person is like, and mistake centrists for left wing extremists.
I would count most of the bongo drumming Occupy Wall Street types to be “far left”. The term “extremists” I would generally reserve for eco-terrorists or maybe even those Greenpeace people who play chicken with whaling ships.
But more and more, I find that those on the “right” tend to view anyone who disagrees with them as “Left Wing Liberals”.
I think it might be fair to say that the powers that be, either left or right, are keen on crisis and the military industrial complex. Not really a left vs. right thing. More of an in power vs. out power dynamic.
But, the altering of Zimmerman’s 911 call, the alacrity with which the media jumped on the UVA or Duke lacrosse rape hoaxes, the way minimum wage is discussed without mention of the research of somebody like Walter Williams, etc., is not the action of an unbiased press.