Conservative David Frum writes in the new issue of New York:

Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, "I'm available--but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?" An hour later, I'd receive an embarrassed second call: "We've decided to go in a different direction."

This is interesting. Up to this point we've only been familiar with progressives--including FAIR staffers--who have been invited, and then promptly uninvited, to appear on Fox. There have also been reports about journalists who were critical of Fox who are barred from appearing.

In other Fox-related news, Bill O'Reilly last night proved that irony is alive and well, announcing that he'd be doing a segment on what the cable news networks should do when people "lie on the air." Naturally, the lie he wants corrected is about something someone said about Bill O'Reilly. Later on, he told guest Bernie Goldberg:

I mean, on this program, if a guest says something that is untrue on this program, I will correct it as soon as we know it's untrue. And I think all the networks should have that rule in place. You have to do that.

Totally in agreement. But what about when the untruths come from the host?

That might explain the piece the wire service ran today, under the headline, "Who's Behind the Wall Street Protests?"

Reporters Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols suggest that Glenn Beck's demented chalkboard scribbles might have actually been on the right track; the protests "may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men"-- George Soros.

They write:

One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests.

Readers learn than none other than Rush Limbaugh has been able to see the clear-as-day connection:

But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, "George Soros money is behind this."

Indeed, when one thinks of the grassroots activists occupying Wall Street, the first question is how on Earth they are bankrolling such a costly project.

Reuters eventually gets to the heart of the critique, and sure enough it involves the Tides Center--another Glenn Beck obsession. They report:

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros' Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

That's actually a somewhat accurate description of what Tides does--which makes the connection to the demonstrations... what, exactly? Here we go:

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

So a philanthropic clearinghouse of sorts received money from a Soros charity. And Adbusters, over the years, has received money from that same clearinghouse. Couldn't be clearer!

The Reuters piece has been picked apart by, among others, Salon's Alex Pareene and Noreen Malone at New York magazine. And a Huffington Post story points out that it's been criticized by other Reuters journalists:

Several Reuters journalists also attacked the story. Business and media writer Felix Salmon called the article "ridiculous" and social media editor Anthony DeRosa said, "When I read 'Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation' I wanted to crawl under a rock."

UPDATE: According to the New York Observer, at some point Reuters switched to a story headlined "Soros: Not a Funder of Wall Street Protests."

The original story unsurprisingly found its way to Fox News Channel-- here's an exchange from last night's O'Reilly Factor with Margaret Hoover:

O'REILLY: I think these guys were organized by the George Soros-funded MoveOn operations. Reuters, by the way, has an article on that today that you have to read, Hoover, linking in the Soros money to these agitators.

HOOVER: And what that article actually said is that Soros money had funded the original group Adbusters.

O'REILLY: That's right.

HOOVER: But the last time Soros directly funded it was seven years ago. Although a lot of Soros money -- and this is the thing about Soros money, is that because it is...

O'REILLY: It's everywhere.

HOOVER: It's everywhere.

O'REILLY: It's everywhere.

HOOVER: And small amounts to all these progressive groups that are progressive groups. There's no way...

O'REILLY: You know what Soros money -- did you see "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where if you went to sleep you became an alien? That's like Soros money. You go to sleep and they come.

A full-page ad in USA Today reminded me that today is the debut of Erin Burnett's CNN show OutFront.  Burnett gained a following at CNBC, and came to the attention of many conservatives with a report on the Today show (7/17/07) that managed to touch on almost every conservative myth about the economy, earning praise from Rush Limbaugh in the process.

After a clip of Hillary Clinton saying that soaring corporate profits were "like trickle-down economics but without the trickle," Burnett made these claims:

But while the rich are getting richer, you may be, too. Here's why: More than half of Americans are invested in the market whether through a 401(k) plan or buying stocks or mutual funds, and many of those investments are surging. The Dow Jones industrial average is up 12 percent so far this year. And if your retirement plan invested in oil, that alone is up 21 percent. It's also worth noting that while politicians talk about two Americas, virtually all Americans are seeing wages rise, and unemployment is at an historic low.

The idea that a surging stock market is great news for everyone because we all have a piece of the Wall Street pie is totally misleading--most people have little invested in the market, even when retirement accounts are counted.  But Burnett really wanted to push that point--she even squeezed it into an NBC Nightly News segment the same evening (7/17/07), claiming that because everyone has a piece of the action this "means the majority of Americans directly benefit from what happens on Wall Street."

And when a deal was cut to keep low tax rates on dividends and capital gains at the end of 2010, Burnett explained: "With capital gains and dividend taxes staying low, the half of Americans that own stocks get a benefit there as well." Except they don't--very few Americans report any such income.

Back to her Today show segment:

You know, for a while, Matt, wage growth had lagged inflation for most Americans. Right now, though, that's not the case. Wages are growing more quickly than they have over the past few years. And, you know, you've been talking so much about whether the tide lifts all boats, the issue of taxes is important here. The top 1 percent of Americans, Matt, pay 30 percent of taxes in this country. The bottom 20 percent of American wage earners pay only 5 percent.

Over this period there was very little growth in median household income;  it's not clear what Burnett was excited about.  And, of course, nothing warms conservative hearts more than complaining about the heavy tax burden of the wealthy. The bottom 20 percent, who are mostly below the poverty live, pay relatively little in taxes because they don't have much money--according to the Congressional Budget Office (6/10), they make 4 percent of the income in the country, so if they were paying 5 percent of the taxes, as Burnett says, that would be more than their share.

That report earned her praise from right-wing talker Rush Limbaugh. When he reiterated his support for her work on MSNBC, she responded: "You made my day. I'm done now, I'm going home."

That wasn't Burnett's only chance to stick up for the wealthy. She attempted to bat away criticism that TARP bailout funds weren't going to pay sky-high bonuses--only the evidence would seem to indicate that they were.

Then again, Burnett may be best known for these comments about China:

I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. Ya know, if China were to revalue it's currency or China is to start making say, toys that don't have lead in them or food that isn't poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they're keeping prices low and they're keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.

When Limbaugh cheered Burnett, he teased that he was  "probably now ruining her career because I have praised her." Quite the opposite.

The Washington Post had a piece yesterday (6/9/11) on Mitt Romney's views on global warming. It serves as a reminder that Republican political candidates are under enormous pressure from the right-wing base of the party on this issue--any politician who's ever suggested that climate change is a problem, or backed efforts to address it, is in trouble.

This is an important thing to point out.  But that doesn't mean the Post thinks climate change is important. See the article's lead sentence:

It seemed like a straightforward question on a second-tier issue: Would Mitt Romney disavow the science behind global warming?

Is the fate of the planet a "second-tier issue"?

Romney's views--"he believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern," explains the Post--aren't pleasing the far right,  whom the Post gives ample space to vent:

"Bye-bye, nomination," Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday on his radio talk show after playing a clip of Romney's climate remark. "Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it."

Then came the Club for Growth, which issued a white paper criticizing Romney. "Governor Romney's regulatory record as governor contains some flaws," the report said, "including a significant one--his support of 'global warming' policies."

And Conservatives4Palin.com, a blog run by some of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s more active supporters, posted an item charging that Romney is "simpatico" with President Obama after he "totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax."

Prominent climate change "skeptic" Christopher Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is also quoted. There's never any indication that what these people are saying is nonsense--perhaps because this is a story about politics, and facts shouldn't get in the way.

The closest thing to that kind of balancing perspective is when the Post pointed out that public opinion is divided:

Public opinion is politicized on the issue. A March Gallup poll found that 32 percent of Republicans think the effects of global warming are already being felt and 36 percent believe the rise in the Earth’s temperatures is caused by humans, while 67 percent say the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news.

The same survey found the opposite trend on the other side of the political fence. Sixty-two percent of Democrats polled said the effects of global warming have begun, and 71 percent said humans are causing the rising temperatures, while 22 percent think the situation is exaggerated. Among independents, there was a fairly even split on those questions.

I'm not sure "politicized" is the most useful term to use here. If many more Republicans believe that Iraq had WMDs, or that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, or that the Earth is flat, are such views "politicized"--or simply inaccurate?

Rush Limbaugh (10/18/10), holding a photo montage from Drudge up to the "Dittocam," went off on a bizarre rant that suggested that Obama was possessed by supernatural evil (Mediaite, 10/19/10):

Folks, these pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look. It is strange that these pictures would be released.... It's very, very, very strange. An American president has never had facial expressions like this. At least we've never seen photos of an American president with facial expressions like this.

It's not the first time that Limbaugh has literally demonized a Democratic politician; in 2001 (FAIR Press Release, 11/22/02), he gave Senate majority leader Tom Daschle the nickname "El Diablo," going on at length (7/20/01) about his diabolical tendencies: "How many different versions of Satan, the devil, have you seen in your life?... We've seen the comic devil of TV shows. We've even seen the smooth, tempting devil in Hollywood movies. Is Tom Daschle simply another way to portray a devil?"

When Daschle complained that after such attacks, "the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that's very disconcerting," Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (WashingtonPost.com, 11/21/02) stuck up for Limbaugh, saying, "Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy."

In 2010, it's hard to deny that hate-filled rhetoric can move unstable individuals to violence--though Limbaugh seems to be playing catch-up here with his rival on the right, Glenn Beck. Both hosts know full well that there's a large segment of their audience for whom demons and devils are not Halloween costumes but all too real supernatural threats.

Andrew Tyndall makes a good point about how the network newcasts covered the Upper Big Branch mining disaster (flagged by Liz Cox Barrett at CJR):

Not once, in all five days of coverage, did a single reporter mention the organization that has worked hardest over the decades to make sure that mining management does not cut safety corners and that miners can monitor their own working conditions with impunity. The union went unmentioned, as did the fact that the Upper Big Branch workforce went unorganized.

Rush Limbaugh, for his part, did mention the miners union--to bash the non-existent union at Massey (Think Progress, 4/13/10):

Where was the union? The union is generally holding these companies up demanding all kinds of safety. Why were these miners continuing to work in what apparently was an unsafe atmosphere?

Alerted to the fact that Massey was, in fact, famously anti-union, and had busted the union at the Upper Big Branch mine, Limbaugh tried to find a way to save himself (4/15/10):

So I checked the e-mail during the break and a bunch of people say: "Hey, Rush, there was no union at that mine. At that Massey mine there was no union. Blankenship kept the union out of there.  You can't blame the union for it."  The left are trying to blame the Massey disaster on its union-busting, in fact.  But: "In 2009 the National Labor Relations Board agreed with a decision that Massey Energy rehire 85 coal miners who said they had been discriminated against because they were union members."  So there were union workers there, and so the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety.... You people, it's been 21 years.  At some point you are going to learn: If you go up against me on a challenge of fact, you are going to be wrong.  It's just that simple.

Is it really that simple? Workers who belong to a union getting their jobs back at a non-union mine is not at all the same as workers having the protection of a union contract. But one of the remarkable things about Limbaugh is that even his most logically tenuous claims may be built on a foundation of make-believe. As UMWA president Cecil Roberts pointed out in the AFL-CIO blog (4/16/10):

Yesterday, Rush said on his program, "But in 2009, the [NLRB] agreed with the decision that Massey Energy rehire 85 coal miners who said they had been discriminated against because they were union members. So there were union workers there. So the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety, the United Mine Workers of America."

Wrong again, Rush. The decision you refer to was AT ANOTHER MINE! And Massey is appealing that decision, meaning the workers who were discriminated against at the Cannelton mine (in another county from the Upper Big Branch mine) have yet to reclaim their rightful jobs as the NLRB ordered.

Those are the facts. Who's wrong now, Rush?

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

--Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru (National Review Online, 3/8/10, via Crooked Timber, 3/9/10)

So, David Paterson will become the massa who gets to appoint whoever gets to take [Rep. Eric] Massa's place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson's gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.

--Rush Limbaugh (Rush Limbaugh Show, 3/9/10, via Media Matters, 3/9/10)

While many are opening their hearts and purses to Haiti's suffering, it’s important to note the corporate media's high profile exceptions. Televangelist Pat Robertson, carried on Disney's Family Channel, suggested Haiti invited the disaster by making a deal with the devil 200 years ago (FAIR Blog, 1/14/09). Radio big Rush Limbaugh discouraged donating to Haiti disaster relief on his January 13 show, saying:  "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax.... You just can’t keep throwing money at it." Meanwhile, Fox's Bill O'Reilly and New York Times columnist David Brooks each presented nauseatingly patronizing prescriptions for Haiti’s rehabilitation.

On his January 13 show, O'Reilly said the way to cure Haiti's economic and social problems was to impose discipline on Haitians:

My travels there have been illuminating. Only half the population can read and write. Unemployment's more than 50 percent. Most Haitians live on less than $2 a day. No matter how much charity is given, no matter how many good intentions there are, Haiti will remain chaotic until discipline is imposed.

In his January 15 Times column, David Brooks offered his prescription: To "fix"  their "progress-resistant culture," Haiti needs to develop "No Excuses countercultures," and turn to paternalism:

It's time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

But according to the human rights group MADRE,  the U.S. has already tried that:

Ironically, Brooks' prescription of "intrusive paternalism" to "fix the culture," aptly sums up U.S. policy towards Haiti for the past 100 years: a brutal military occupation from 1915 to 1934; support for dictatorship from 1957 to 1986; and, more recently, the imposition of trade policies that have further impoverished people. What the outside world needs to "fix" is not Haitian culture, but its own self-serving policies that have left thousands of Haitians literally buried alive.

Bill Fletcher, executive editor of Black Commentator, had more to say on this subject on the latest edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin (1/15/10).

John K. Wilson (Obamapolitics, 10/16/09) on Rush Limbaugh and fake quotes:

When it came to people repeating false quotes about Limbaugh that Limbaugh himself had never bothered to deny, Limbaugh was outraged: "we are in the process behind the scenes working to get apologies and retractions with the force of legal action against every journalist who has published these entirely fabricated quotes about me, slavery, and James Earl Ray."

But when it came to his own false quotes, Limbaugh has been entirely indifferent to fake quotes.

In one of his books, Limbaugh claimed to be quoting James Madison: "We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." The quote was a fake. Limbaugh admitted: "The quote is not Madison's. But the misattribution of this statement (an error, not 'a lie') has been made by many over the years."

Ah, so when Limbaugh was publishing fake quotes, it was "an error, not 'a lie,'" and it was excused because the mistake was made "by many over the years."

On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of "liberal hate speech" by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center's newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool's edition published almost a month earlier. The next day (4/28/95), Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: "Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it's not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up." Limbaugh's error was even more amazing because he had made the exact same mistake of reading the newsletter’s fake quotes as if they were real one year before (Extra!, 7-8/94).

"Rush the Racist?" is the headline over a commentary written by retired NFL receiver Keenan McCardell on the Washington Post's sports blog, the League--and the question many football fans might ask upon hearing the news that Rush Limbaugh is bidding to become co-owner of the St. Louis Rams.

That's because Limbaugh has a long record of making racist remarks. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed written by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and myself, we documented many instances of Limbaugh's racism, including his admission that he once told a black caller to "take that bone out of your nose," his assertion that "all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson," and his advice to a group with a 90-year commitment to nonviolence: "The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."

Last year Limbaugh referred to Barack Obama as "the little black man-child." This past January, while discussing Barack Obama with Sean Hannity on Fox, Limbaugh said, "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president."

So the prospect of Limbaugh owning a team in a league where nearly two-thirds of the players are African-American should be natural media buzz generator. As CBSSports.com's Mike Freeman wrote under the headline "NFL's Greatest Nightmare," "sometimes these column thingies write themselves." (Unfortunately, Freeman's column, also posted on the Washington Post's League blog, repeated an alleged Limbaugh quote about the merits of slavery that is unverified.)

Perhaps Limbaugh’s most notable remark in the St. Louis context was his 1994 response to learning from a caller to his show that St. Louis would be extending a light rail system into East St. Louis--a community of some 40,000 residents, almost all of whom are black. Said Rush (The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, New Press, 1995): "They got a light rail system to East St. Louis where nobody goes?"

Reporters might ask East St. Louis residents what they think about the prospect of Rush Limbaugh owning their local football team.

On his Media Citizen blog, Free Press' Timothy Karr (9/17/09) has compiled some astounding Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs quotes propounding a "fear that's laced with paranoia, stoked by misinformation and prejudice and fed to millions of people via powerful media"--namely that "the most anti-American notion of the lot is the idea that we need to reform the media itself":

While Beck and his ilk want to portray diversity and localism as a dangerous conspiracy to censor, the fact remains that these ideas have been staples of communications policy since the beginning. The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission--as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934--is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.

Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that "safeguarding the public's right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is ... an integral component of the FCC's mission."

Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard.

"What mainstream media's fear-merchants are most afraid of," writes Karr, "is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job--creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media."

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "The Great Spectrum Giveaway" (10/95) by Jim Naureckas.

Former President Jimmy Carter's statement (NBC, 9/15/09)  that "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," has generated widespread discussion in the corporate media. But few of the many analyses of Carter's remarks give you much of a sense of why one might think that many of Obama's foes are motivated by racism.

No one can look into another person's heart, of course. But many of Obama's most prominent critics have talked enough about the president and race to provide plenty of evidence about where they're coming from.  And no one has been more revealing of their inner demons than Rush Limbaugh; who can forget this classic too-much-information rant?

We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.

Strikingly, the same day Carter made his supposedly controversial comments about racism and Obama critics, Limbaugh (9/15/09) was engaged in all-out race-baiting over a schoolbus fight that was initially reported as a racial incident:

It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

If that's not an expression of a racial animus, what would qualify?  Why is it more controversial to criticize people who issue hateful rants like this than it is to make them in the first place?

Media Matters research director Jeremy Schulman (8/12/09) writes that "Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have used their radio and television shows to incite hatred and push wild conspiracy theories, leading several of Beck's advertisers to reportedly pull out of his broadcasts"--one of the hazards inherent in for-profit media.

But "many advertisers have nonetheless sponsored these hosts' hate speech in recent weeks, including major corporations and organizations that, in 2006, reportedly requested that ABC Radio Networks not air their advertisements during any Air America programs":

At the time,

ABC subsequently provided a statement to Media Matters, which read: "It is not uncommon for advertisers and/or agencies to request that their ads run or not run in specific programming environments or dayparts. ABC Radio Networks does not solicit nor encourage these requests from advertisers. If a request is made by an advertiser and /or agency we make our best effort to comply."...

The New York Times reported at the time that "the advertisers' avoidance of Air America's liberal programming seems pointed when contrasted with the commercial success of right-wing talk radio programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity." [New York Times, 11/6/06]

Indeed, Schulman tells us how, "despite their appearance on ABC's Air America 'blackout' list in 2006, a number of those same advertisers have recently run ads during broadcasts of one or more of the following: Limbaugh's radio show, Beck's Fox News show, Beck's radio show, Dobbs' CNN show and Dobbs' radio show." He then provides for your perusal a handy list of said advertisers, including--no surprise--General Electric.

Glenn Greenwald has responded via his regular Salon feature (8/6/09, ad-viewing required) to Rush Limbaugh, "speaking to his audience of 15 million, compar[ing] Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler and Nancy Pelosi to Nazi leaders," by asking you to instead

compare (a) the way that a single anonymous person's comparison of Bush and Hitler swamped our political discourse and forever altered the image of MoveOn with (b) what the (non)-reaction will be to the identical comparison coming from the leader of the Republican Party who spouts his hate-mongering to an audience of 15 million people. Within that comparison one finds many central truths about how our political debates and media discussions function.

Looking beyond how corporate media pilloried Democratic activist group MoveOn over user-submitted (and never-published) video, Greenwald gives a maddeningly extensive history of corporate media compliance with right-wingers' Nazi smears, and simultaneous reprobation of even spurious such instances from the left.

See the FAIR Action Alert: "When Are Nazi Comparisons Deplorable?: For Fox News, Only When Republicans Are the Target" (1/16/04).

Progressive critic Dr. Roberto Rodriguez has a new commentary (New America Media, 6/2/09) demonstrating how the miserable press reaction to Judge Sonia Sotomayor's U.S. Supreme Court "nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less." But, Rodriguez laments, "to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include Fox News and virtually all the known right-wing radio talkshow hosts, is the antithesis of journalism":

Their coverage of the Sotomayor nomination points to the need for honest debate, not simply on the issues of race, but on the right wing's aversion to truth. It also points to the right wing's pompous beliefs, on every topic, including affirmative action, that their positions are "American."

Extremist politicos Newt Gingrich and Tom Tancredo, both of whom have zero credibility but are stars of right-wing media, have led the charge that Sotomayor is a racist. They have been joined by the usual wingnuts: Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, to name a few. Even Juan Williams of NPR, has parroted the claim that Sotomayor's (out-of-context) statements are racist. The fact that the nation’s discussion centers on whether she is a racist or not--or that she is an "affirmative action" pick (Buchanan)--points to both the power of the wingnuts and also to the virtual impotence, or complicity, of mainstream media.

While "these pundits who daily rant against 'illegal aliens,' and who daily clamor on the need to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, are quoted as credible sources by the mainstream press," Rodriguez remains hopeful that "the majority of Americans can see through the false arguments...by these so-called patriots." Yet "this does not hold true for the mainstream media. As we are seeing with Sotomayor, all it takes is a handful of 'extremists' to control and shape the media debate."