Media Rare

I'm not the only one who sees that "liberal" news networks will never have the audience that Fox "news" does. Even a guy with a large national audience agrees:

...you'll never have a liberal equivalent to Fox News that has anything like the same level of success. Conservatives believe that the mainstream news is fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. They want a fully closed information ecosystem in which every piece of data they consume is filtered through the perspective of the conservative movement. Very, very few liberals want that. They want their liberal opinion, but they also want straight news, or at the very least news that isn't overtly propagandistic like on Fox. MSNBC has slightly right-of-center programming in the morning with Joe Scarborough, straight news throughout the day, then liberal opinion at night.

It's a battle liberals will always lose. And whereas that's great for Glenn and Bill and Sean and Sarah and Mike, it's really bad news for our country. Because not only is Fox "news" not only not a news organization but a coordinated propaganda organ, it's much more: it's the kingmaker for Republican candidates. Half of them are literally paid employees: Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee. Others, per instructions from Sarah herself, have decided to campaign exclusively through appearances on Fox, knowing they'll never be challenged. It's become the pattern for virtually all the teabagger candidates: Angle, Paul, O'Donnell, and more.

So why is that a bad thing? It hardly takes thought to answer: these candidates are bought and paid for by Fox "news." The candidates owe everything to Rupert Murdoch, one of the richest and most blatantly partisan, agenda-driven men on the planet. In a most obvious sense, this man will have a significant part of our government fully beholden to him, dependent on him, afraid of him; with the power of the unspoken threat to turn his propaganda against them any time they disagree with him. This is much more than being beholden to money; it's potentially total control of politicians by the man who literally produces, edits, and shapes all the information consumed by conservatives. It's a hell of a lot more than pursestrings: it's total influence over how these politicians will be perceived. I'd say that pretty much puts the teabagger candidates in Rupert's pocket.

Who but a teabagger would consider that a good thing? Who but a teabagger would not recognize and be repelled by this perversion of democracy, this unprecedented political influence?

And who but a teabagger would so willingly let themselves be used in such a way?