I had an epiphany about the "liberal media."

Start with money and empire and the need to make them grow. That's Bush and Reagan and Bush and Carter and Clinton and Nixon, et al, ad gustum. Democrat or Republican, either way, you trace the money for each of them, trace their wars and skirmishes and proxy wars, look at the benevolent relations between Reagan and Saddam, Carter and the Shah, Suharto, Ceaucescu, our leaders energetically working against democracy in Central and South America. Got the picture? Donate money and training and professional military guidance to a proxy army that's fighting against an elected government in Nicaragua, and all the while keeping up a rolling diatribe about "democracy" and "freedom fighters" who accidentally murdered a few more nuns. In order to stretch as far as they can, control more of the world and make more money, they need a steady stream of PR. They get some great minds working on it, and they manage to practically convince citizens that 2+2=5. How many hijackers on 9/11 were Iraqis? 2+2=5 of them. Which side refused to have democratic elections in Vietnam, US or the North Vietnamese? Using biological or chemical weapons is barbaric and outrageous, but Agent Orange was just for the plants, right?

Then you look at the media. GE, Disney, AOL Time Warner, all liberal? How liberal can a transnational corporation be? It's not a total conspiracy ala Orwell, because the truth can still get through in American newspapers. But look at the column inches devoted to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, and compare it with the coverage of any other conflict at the time that resulted in one-quarter of the invaded population being killed. The truth squeaks through here and there. You can read about the nuns getting murdered, but it's not a big story, not much emphasis on their murderers being trained and funded and supplied by daily airdrops from the US, how we taught them to seek out "soft targets" like farmers and hospitals instead of fighting against actual military targets.

Still, newspapers and tv have to let big things out every once in a while, when it becomes too conspicuous. The truth is just too much. Revealing even these squeaks of truth about nuns being murdered, or reporting about war and politics in straightforward language, this still causes problems for politicians trying to convince us that 2+2=5. The damn paper occasionally concedes that 2+2 might result in something ranging between 3 and 5, and suddenly the empire's PR system has to go into overdrive.

This is unacceptable to the people who need spin doctors to make more money, the same people who pay for all politicians to reach office. And that's how corporate-owned media can be called "liberal" media, in the same kind of way that Contras were called "Freedom Fighters" and Ariel Sharon was dubbed "a man of peace."

[Can you tell I've been reading Chomsky?]