Conservatives and liberals each are equally convinced that the media is biased. Conservatives bellow about the "liberal mainstream media". Liberals rage that the media caves into conservative bullying and manipulation.
Actually, the media is biased, but not in the way you may think. The media, especially the electronic media is biased toward the easily packaged story. Stories for which members of the public already have buzz words in their collective memory. Take this silly obsession on MSNBC, Fox, and CNN on the John Kerry statements about staying in school. People already have an image of Kerry and an image of Bush v. Kerry. Easy story to report. Don't have to tell who the players are. Don't have to explain why they would disagree. The whole story can be written in code that each side can read with biases intact. Similarly, the Michael J. Fox story was reported as a battle between liberal Hollywood (Fox) and conservative values (Limbaugh), instead of a story about the ravages of a progressive disease or the complexities of stem cell research. This is a bias toward the cheap sound bite and simplistic formulae, not toward any consistent ideology.
I know many of you disagree with me on this. It is certainly easy to argue that FOX is consistently conservative, even radical. It is easy to complain that conservative talking heads vastly outnumber liberal talking heads on CNN and MSNBC. But my point in this context is that the media are lazy, easily distracted by the controversial, the flashy, the easily digested. They hold viewers in contempt, assuming that the public is as lazy as they are or too unintelligent to understand or care about the issues.
Venues like this and other progressive web sites allow issues to be dissected, discussed, and debated. But progressives and (yes, I will claim it) liberals need to learn to adapt to the venue. Conservatives have adapted to the laziness of the media by developing a highly successful band of talking personalities who excel in robot speak. No matter what the question, the answer is the same. Their phrases echo in our heads like an irritating snatch of a pop song that won't stop.. "Keep more of your own money", "Family values", "Protect the Children", "Keep America safe for Americans", "Fight them there"... You know the drill.
What we must avoid and battle is the robot speak. While I agree with much of Lakoff's premise about framing issues, I think the conservatives have so overdone the echo chamber that I think a fresh approach is in order. On reason people are attracted to Obama is that he sounds fresh. Ideas we can all understand spoken eloquently. We don't want "a guy just like us" in the Bush mold- an inarticulate, intractable average man. We want a guy who is the best of us, a guy we would be like if we could. I am not specifically meaning Obama here. Anyone would do who is fresh and crisp. Democrats need to send out admirable people with shining eyes and inspiring visions. Specific plans to solve the world's problems but wrapped in a world view that inspires and uplifts. The contrast between this and the tired automatons of the Republican would be dramatic.