What liberal media? A blog reporter follows the money and makes the point that the Mainstream news media is Republican dominated, because its top directors and leadership tend to be supporters of the Republican Party and Republican PACs. But he is unable to connect the dominance to the newsroom.

This article is a commentary about a major posting at DailyKos: The GOP Owns Your News.

Background - In General, Dems and Liberals tend to feel that the media are too reserved in challenging the Powers that Be.

The Dem blogosphere does not believe the Republican spin that Big Media is biased toward the liberal end of the spectrum. One Dem, in the article linked above, is trying to prove that Big Media is really controlled by Republicans. In trying to make his point, he goes over the top often, but on the money issues he uses real facts. Nonetheless, he overall fails to prove his thesis that GOP ownership leads to a pro-GOP news operation.

The Dem blogosphere, myself included, feels that Big Media are too conservative. The Media are not as critical as they should be. They accept the party line too easily. They do not challenge our leaders enough. That’s how Dems tend to feel. The DailyKos article linked above is getting a lot of attention because it attempts to prove the pro-GOP hypothesis using real facts related to political donations of the leadership of the media companies.

We only have anecdotal and “opinion” evidence supporting our feeling that the media are too conservative generally. Except for Fox and Talk Radio! You can’t talk about big media without talking about the Right Wing Talk Radio Monopoly, and about Fox News.

The Republican-dominated talk news scene is blatantly partisan to a fault. In the cable world, Fox News is oh-so-clearly over the top Republican (yet is ashamed of its own bias). Yes, Fox is ashamed of its bias, because it won’t admit the bias. Notice how Fox chants “Fair and Balanced” ad nauseum, like a mantra, as if it is pleading with people to agree? Ever wonder why Fox does not feature testimonials from credible people attesting to their opinion that Fox is fair and balanced?

And so, Dems don’t think the media are liberal, overall. A lot of Dems go even further and think that the Media are pretty blantantly pro-Republican (but most media outlets are way less pro-Republican than Fox). I myself do not think the media are pro-Republican, but I think they do us a disservice through superficial reporting. And I think the right wing talk radio insult-fests are unAmerican and shameful (if I knew of any Dem radio insult fests I’d trash them as well - I don’t listen to Air America, so I can’t comment on that).

A blogosphere reporter on DailyKos has followed the money and attempted to prove actual Republican domination of the mainstream media. Let’s talk about what the reporter is saying and attempting to prove.

Go check out the article yourself. The GOP Owns Your News. Here’s a nutshell of what you will find:

The reporter assumes the following: Generally speaking, the on-air news talent, and the reporters whose names appear on the bylines of newspapers, are not the persons with the real meaningful control of what stories get reported and the “spin” to be placed on those stories - those decisions are made above. Therefore, it is misleading to judge a news outfit because of the words reporters say or write.

The reporter also assumes: The mainstream media are too easy on Republicans, due to the influence of the people who really run the show.

Who really runs the show? The reporter concludes that a handful of corporations control the mainstream big media. This handful of corporations is controlled by a relatively small group of directors and top officers. The group is small because of the consolidation of media companies in the last 15 or 20 years.

Using public sources, the reporter was able to identify the recent political contributions of this small group of power players.

How effective is the reporter at making his ultimate point? Not very.

The reporter does ok at showing that the directors and a lot of the top executives are Republican supporters.

But the reporter pretty well fails to make the leap, failing to connect the Republican dominance of leadership positions to the daily news reporting.

In order to prove that Republican inflluences dominate the newsroom, we would need to have testimony from those in charge of the newsrooms. Furthermore, we would need to have testimony from those who take their marching orders from the newsroom leadership.

But we lack any such testimonies.

Absent any testimonies from newsroom personnel, what is proven by showing that directors and top officers tend to be Republicans?

Well, I guess the proof shows that directors and top officers tend to be Republicans. Other than that, it doesn’t show much.

And so, for all the reporter’s hard work, I have to say he failed to make his utlimate point.

Those of us who feel the Media, overall, are too conservative have nothing new to support our viewpoint. We have anecdotal evidence, we have our feelings and opinions, but we have lilttle hard evidence to back us up. We gotta hear from the most credible people: Those in the newsrooms.