As much as conservatives appreciate the counter-balance of the conservative media, it can be shocking to witness the audacity of liberals pretending that Fox News & Co. are enormous, and uniquely partisan in nature.
Former Obama spin artist Dan Pfeiffer wrote this in one of his regular articles for the glossy left-wing rag Vanity Fair: “the conservative media dwarfs the progressive media in size and scope.”
This makes no sense whatsoever, unless....you categorize the “progressive media” as nothing more than magazines like Mother Jones and The Nation and a few websites like HuffPost, Slate, and Vox.
Pfeiffer must be excluding ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on. After all this time, the Democrats still pretend these outlets are some gold standard of objectivity, which by now is the most bald-faced lie imaginable.
And he’s touting a book titled Battling the Big Lie. Try not to laugh.
Pfeiffer insisted Fox is uniquely partisan: “The Republicans have a television network whose sole raison d’etre is to attack Democrats and provide pro-GOP talking points.” This man is apparently incapable of imagining that liberal networks exist to attack Republicans and earnestly provide pro-Democrat talking points.
But he’s got chutzpah: “Even then it’s an apples-and-oranges comparison. The bulk of the media on the right is an adjunct of the party apparatus; during the Trump presidency, it was Trump-adjacent propaganda – Pravda, but with plausible deniability.”
This springs forth from a spokesman for....Barack Obama. You know, the man the liberal media treated as a demigod. His speeches were like a symphony. When he went to the beach, the sun glinted off his “chiseled pectorals.” He was an American prince born “out of history and hope.” His election was like mankind landing on the moon.
We had eight years of “Obama-adjacent propaganda.” Bernard Goldberg wrote a book about it called A Slobbering Love Affair. There is no plausible deniability that the prestige media adored, even ogled Obama.
But Pfeiffer wants to pretend that only the conservative media are obsequious, while the progressive media are too pushy in pressuring the Democrats: “Much of the media on the left is focused on holding Democrats accountable and/or moving the party’s agenda in a more progressive direction,” he complains. “This is, of course, an admirable and necessary task, but it doesn’t do much to help Democratic candidates and causes win the messaging battle against Republicans come election time.”
This is a different sound than Pfeiffer in Vanity Fair in 2018: “What I think is important for Democrats to recognize is that we too often believe it is the press’s job to do our job for us, and so that’s why people get mad.” That is perfectly accurate.
Biden is mad right now because the media hasn’t spared him from unpopularity. All these frustrated Democrats are obsessing about “messaging” as if they can’t be blamed for any of the multiple disasters unfolding in America today.
Pfeiffer carries the same ideological virus as many liberals in believing they are the essence of democracy, and conservatives are cartooned as the forces of autocracy. On MSNBC, Pfeiffer insisted "If you go to Facebook on a daily basis...Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire has more followers and engagement, many times more than the New York Times or CNN. That is a problem for democracy."
Liberals cannot imagine that democracy is much broader than their own ideological bubble, that conservatives make democracy vibrant by holding Democrats accountable and pushing back on the punishing groupthink of woke corporations. Come November, democracy may look more energetic than it does now.
