Liberal Talk Radio

I just read this artilce by Mark Leon Goldberg in The American Prospect and it touched off a few thoughts in my mind. For a while, I’d been annoyed that Democrats always have to defend whatever Michael Moore says while Republicans get to isolate themselves from their own wingnuts.

To me, this is more proof that the media’s “liberal bias” pales in comparison with it’s “laziness bias.” Here’s a quick test: compare the number of times a reporter asked John Kerry to defend Michael Moore with the number of times a reporter asked George Bush to defend James Dobson. The reason, it seems, is that the “Elephant Echo Chamber” of talk radio and FOX hypes the Moore-Kerry analogy all the time, where it slowly filters into the minds of lazy mainstream journalists.

Goldberg, though, tells me that the reason why we associate Kerry with Moore but don’t associate Bush with Dobson has as much to do with the Democrats poor branding:

By contrast, the Republican “brand” is strongly recognized, and voters can easily distinguish mainstream Republicanism from its extremist impostures. Ronald Reagan made the distinction clear in 1966, when he mused that the endorsement by the McCarthyite John Birch Society of his candidacy for governor of California meant only that “they’re buying my philosophy; I’m not buying theirs.” More recently, no one seriously thought that the über-conservative author Ann Coulter represented the views of the Republican Party when she suggested in a column soon after the September 11 attacks that the proper response September 11 was to “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, make no such distinction. Indeed, some Democratic leaders have appeared publicly with Moore, and when he appears with members of the party, it becomes ever more dif?cult to deny that he, at least in some way, represents them.

Sometimes it pays to look inward. I still think the media’s lazy, and I still think we need a “Donkey Echo Chamber” to feed liberal-friendly talking points to said lazy media, but I now also realize that the confusion occurs at least in part becaue the Democrats need to work seriously on their mainstream “brand.”