What is with the mainstream media and their infatuation with “crazy” conservatives?
ABC News is the latest media outlet to “reach out” to Republicans by picking an angry bomb-thrower to represent the GOP on George Stephanopoulos’ THIS WEEK Sunday show.
Stephanopoulos announced yesterday that conservative talk-radio host Laura Ingraham is ABC’s “newest contributor.”
Ingraham is awful. She reeks of Fox News and the angry right. What exactly will she contribute to intellectual discourse other than bile?
But it’s always this way with the mainstream media. They have this set idea of what a “Republican” and what a “Democrat” look like. And neither is terribly close to the truth.
On MSNBC, for example, a Democratic guest or contributor is someone preferably under 30, and cute.
On CNN, things tend to go better. But they too like their Republicans a bit surly and far to the right – former CNN “contributor” (that means they paid him) and GOP blogger Erick Erickson, who now is at Fox News, comes to mind. (The rest of us, when they don’t put “contributor” after our name, do not get paid for our TV appearances, just fyi.)
The Washington Post can be just as bad. They had a famous brouhaha now several years back when they decided to hire a liberal and a conservative blogger. The liberal ended up being the tame, as compared to Laura Ingraham, and quite good Greg Sargent. The conservative was a far-right bomb-thrower who thought Coretta Scott King was a “commie,” and was facing serious plagiarism allegations that seemed to mount by the day. He was then replaced with another far-right nut.
Then there’s Fox News, where the men need to be old and white, and the women young, blond, beautiful and wearing a primary-colored one-piece dress. But even on Fox, real Republicans are conservatives, not moderates.
I’ve complained for years about how “to be Republican” in today’s GOP one must be “conservative.” About how the discussion, every time a GOP presidential primary comes around, is which candidate is the “real conservative” – because to be a true Republican one must of course be “conservative.” And they haggle over which candidate is more like Ronald Reagan (because the candidates wrongly assume that Ronald Reagan, in 2014, would be a conservative – he wouldn’t be).
But now we see the mainstream media making the same mistake, assuming that the only real Republican is a conservative, and usually an angry and caustic conservative at that. Laura Ingraham isn’t a deep-thinker like George Will or Bill Kristol or David Frum. She’s a bomb-thrower, and she represents a lot of what’s wrong with political discourse in America today.
If I were still a Republican, I’d be ticked at ABC. As a Democrat, I’m simply disappointed.
