How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backward to Please the Right
Once upon a time, dramatic TV coverage of showdowns in Birmingham and Selma made the media equal partners in the struggle to civilize America. After the 1968 Democratic Convention,however, executives startled to learn that most Americans reviled the media for "taking the protesters' side" set in motion the broken mainstream media dynamic of today: bending over backward to please a mythic "middle America," patronizing even the most popular liberal political expressions as "elitist." Building on Rick Perlstein's NIXONLAND, this panel will explore this pattern's causes and consequences, and whether and how online activism might change it.
Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton and an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.
Heather "Digby" Parton is a political writer and activist from Santa Monica, California and founder of the progressive blog Hullabaloo. She is a principal in the progressive netroots political PAC, Blue America, and serves on the board of the Progressive Congress Action Fund. Her work also appears at Salon magazine, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars, Alternet and Our Future.org. In 2007, she accepted the Paul Wellstone Award on behalf of the progressive blogosphere at the take back America Conference.
Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America(Scribner). His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. He is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con. His writings have appeared The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Newsday, and The New Yorker. He lives in Chicago.
Duncan Black is known as "Atrios" on his blog, Eschaton.
