Diane Sawyer Becomes Leader of the “Liberal Media”

sawyer gibson

Charles Gibson has announced he will be stepping down as anchor at ABC’s World News. Diane Sawyer will be replacing him. With the tendency of many on the far right to ignore any information presented by the mainstream media which does not support the imaginary world view which is necessary to hold the views currently held by the conservative movement, I wonder how long it will be before Sawyer is attacked as another representative of the mythical “liberal media.”

Once the attacks against Sawyer as a member of the “liberal media” begin, keep in mind that Sawyer has worked for both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It is actually quite common for many in the media to have some partisan ties in their past. The most obvious such example at ABC is George Stephanopoulos, who worked for Bill Clinton. There are many others working in broadcast news with ties to both the Democratic and Republican Party, with far more Republicans in such positions for it to make sense to see the mainstream media as having a distinctly liberal bias.

4 Comments

  1. 1
    Mike's I.P. alter-ego says:

    I didn’t know Sawyer worked for Nixon. Nixon was a big lib too, with his expansion of spending on the NEH and NEA. Simply put, if your name isn’t Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh, you’re a lib. (I’m just kidding)

  2. 2
    Eclectic Radical says:

    “Nixon was a big lib too, with his expansion of spending on the NEH and NEA.”
     
    Well, if one goes strictly by the domestic policy under his administration then yes… Nixon was one of the three most liberal presidents we have ever had, along with FDR and LBJ.
     
    The media has always had a strong ‘establishment Republican’ (Eisenhower/Scranton/Nixon Republicans as opposed to either extremely liberal Rockefeller Republicans or extremely conservative religious right wingers) with a solid, if tepid, support for social reform while maintaining pro-business, hawkish positions on economics and defense. Henry Luce, the founder of the ‘Time/Life’ magazine empire was such a Republican, as was Walter Annenberg. Most other figures in the national media fell into this category as well.
     
    Now, newspapers and newspaper reporters have a slightly different history. Since the Progressive Era, many newspapers have been owned by ‘liberal’ families with a philanthropic belief in public service and an ‘aristrocratic’ sense of duty to society. Most print reporters who came up during the ‘great’ years of the newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s were inculcated with this liberalism, and they passed it on to their successors in the 1950s and 1960s. Many pioneers of tv journalism (Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw all come to mind) began in this tradition of print media and transitioned into radio and television and brought such traditions with them.
     
    However, as newspaper ownership has become more corporate and fewer television journalists have print media backgrounds, the liberal tendencies of newspapers and reporters are fading. Many ‘liberal’ papers and reporters are more accurately ‘Democratic establishmentarian’ than genuinely ‘liberal.’
     
    Corporate ownerhsip favors establishmentarianism, left or right, to true conservatism or true liberalism because corporations draw their power, protection, and support from that establishment. Right and left (say Bill O’Riley or Rachel Maddow) are simply ways to sell commercial ad space.
     

  3. 3
    Amy says:

    Charlie will be missed but I think Diane will be a great replacement.

  4. 4
    Lenninism says:

    James Randi, the intellectual scientist, psychic and paranormal debunker, and ardent atheist, should have his own TV show. Randi has projected the truth regarding atheism for decades, and he needs a TV show to educate the dumb believers and entertain the nonbelievers (the intelligent folks).

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