The US media are as liberal as the corporations which own them Part 2.

I have been saying that NPR is a commercial media outlet and pretty right wing these days. The commercial accusation comes from the fact that the conservatives have worked to ensure that no public funding is used for public broadcasting (which includes the The Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Thus US Public Broadcasting resorts to extort-a-thons and corporate “underwriting”, which is a fancy word for commericals. Corporations can pull their “underwriting” if the media decide to publish something contrary to the corporation’s interests. Likewise, it seems that the Cato Institute is dictating NPR’s editorial policy.

Anyway, FAIR had Steve Rendall 5 Mar 10 blog post: Progressive History on the Public Airwaves: U.S. vs. U.K. from 03/05/2010 which confirms that my suspicions may not be too far off.

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the end of the historic British miners strike of 1984-85. The BBC has a special broadcast in commemoration, The Ballad of the Miners Strike, featuring the voices of miners.
But where can Americans turn for commemorations of our progressive history? There is always Howard Zinn’s excellent book, A People’s History of the United States. But turn on NPR, the closest thing the U.S. has to the BBC, and the closest you’ll get to the people’s history is the denunciation of Zinn.

Going to the NPR Finds Right-Wing Crank to Spit on Zinn’s Grave: David Horowitz in ATC obituary with substance-free attack post makes the request for action that people ask “why All Things Considered brought on David Horowitz to trash the late Howard Zinn when NPR’s extensive coverage of William F. Buckley included no critical guests?”

NPR’s coverage has become very right wing as of late, which is part of the reason I posted the Coffee Party info. It seems to me that the US MSM is far too fixated upon the “Tea Party Movement” which is obviously astro-turf.

On the other hand, I watch the BBC and see stories about the Rich-Poor gap in Britain. There is the work Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett which posits that that there is one common factor that links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their citizens: not wealth,resources, culture, climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore, more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them—the well-off as well as the poor.

In the US, health care isn’t considered a right, yet owning a deadly weapon is. Hardly anyone seems to be challenging this idiocy beyond FAIR (How the NRA Rewrote the Constitution and Gun Control, the NRA and the Second Amendment). Where is the screaming about healthcare other than the astroturf tea party movement?

Again, I have to recommend the Wisconsin AFL-CIO’s reports on the Right Wing movement.

Anyway, why aren’t the US MSM asking the same questions that the BBC and FAIR ask? Where are the media who will ask the questions and post the news that people need to hear?