Michael Wolff over in Vanity Fair claims that today's liberal pundits are dour and humorless, that liberal media is on the decline, and conservative media is ascendant. This even as he lists Jon Stewart, Al Franken, Wonkette et al.
His sole examples of stodgy, humorless liberal media? Slate and the Times.
This may have been true five years ago--heck, even two years ago. But we seem to have turned a corner. And it's the conservatives who are becoming stodgy, rigid, uptight, and, yes, humorless.
About a year ago, Katha Pollitt noted a change in liberals:
It took ages, not to mention a suspect election and a suspect war, but suddenly everywhere you look Democrats and liberals are fighting back.
The prissy and thin-lipped are cracking jokes, policy wonks are gabbing on Air America, voters once proud of being as unherdable as cats leap aboard the projects of MoveOn.org and write checks to long-shot red-state candidates because Howard Dean says it's a good idea.
Conservatives aren't used to this. Heck, the mainstream media can't wrap itself around the idea of hip, funny, irreverent, yet righteously outraged liberals.
So, naturally, conservatives overreact. Thus, Bush jokes are symptomatic of a mental disorder and splatting conservatives with pies is a heinous act of violence.
There's a reason for this: Conservatives love to paint themselves as the underdog, even when they're not. When liberals laugh at their expense or publicly ridicule them, it destroys the illusion. Thus, the tendency to exaggerate what the other side says or does.
As Pollitt notes: "[T}here is a schoolmasterish quality to all this finger-wagging. What are we talking about here? Some over-the-top e-mails? Whoopi Goldberg's off-color jokes?"
In fact, there have always been some funny folks on the left: Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, James Wolcott, and Michael Moore come to mind. Wolff probably needs to be reminded that the SCLM wants its liberal pundits to be as inoffensive (read: humorless) as possible. When was the last time Wolcott or Ivins appeared on the chat show circuit?
In Mystery of the Democrats' New Spine, Robert Parry also noted the rise of progressive media.
With humor and without deference, the progressive hosts give voice to the outrage that many American liberals feel over what they regard as years of conservative highhandedness -- a stolen election in 2000, a deceptive case for war in Iraq in 2002-03, and the smearing of Kerry's war record in 2004.
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For the first time in memory, many Americans are hearing coherent and consistent arguments from progressives. It's suddenly cool to stand up to Bush and to recognize the phoniness of the mainstream media.
The lesson for progressive leaders would seem to be that media holds a huge potential for energizing liberals, challenging the Bush administration and reaching out to moderate Americans who are growing more alarmed over right-wing radicalism. Yet, despite this opportunity, many leading figures on the Left remain resistant to expanding the progressive media effort.
Instead of waiting for SCLM to catch up, liberals should continue to create their own media outlets.
Oh yeah, and it's also time to reclaim the label of "cool." The idea of conservatism as "cool" is about as credible as Bush's claims about Social Security and Iraq. Liberal, open-minded, and progressive are cool. Bigoted, dishonest, and humorless are not.
