MORE INSIGHTS FROM EX-NEOCON INSIDER, DAVID BROCK

THE OPEN BIAS IN RIGHT WING JOURNALISM

[OPEN QUOTE] The political bias was more blatant on the weekly [Washington] Times magazine, Insight, where I was assigned as a news reporter. . . . Insight was modeled on Time and Newsweek. I quickly learned what it took to be one of Pod's [John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz] golden boys: a mix of reported fact laced with a heavy dose of conservative—preferably neoconservative—spin. We made no bones about the magazine's ideological biases around the office, which we justified as balancing out the liberal biases that so infuriated us in the pages of the major news weeklies. Yet in the doublespeak that I was coached in at the Times, the magazine was marketed as objective journalism, and this is how we presented ourselves to the reading public.

I could see that those who hewed to the party line got plum assignments and rose through the ranks. One young comer was Danny Wattenberg, the son of neocon columnist Ben Wattenberg and a former speechwriter for the architect of Reagan's contra policy, Elliott Abrams. Abrams also happened to be Pod's brother-in-law. On the other hand, those who didn't inject politics into their work—and there were plenty of regular, old-school journalists on both the paper and the magazine—had their copy mangled by Pod and were shunted to the sidelines by the mini-cons. [CLOSE QUOTE] by David Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 27.

The comparison between the doublespeak of these Washington Times staffers and the staffers of the "Fox in the Bush Network" is educational. Sadly, too many of the readers and watchers of those two propaganda outlets for the Bushite religion are too unsophisticated and undereducated to evaluate what they're getting. There's a reason that Republicans push their followers to distrust the intellectual elite. That's how Bush and company stay in power, by trashing solid scholarship and scientific integrity and supporting those who are not so objective.

WHO'S A JUDICIAL ACTIVIST?

All this stuff is so obvious, can anyone on the right claim that their goal is to be judicially conservative? Brock tells it like it is from the inside out:

"More than any single fIgure, for the right, Bork's nomination represented the culmination of a strategy put in place at the beginning of the Reagan administration to force a right-wing economic and social agenda on the country by judicial fiat. Judicial conservatism—the respectable idea of a limited role for the judiciary in a democracy—was abandoned by these right-wing judicial extremists, who belonged to a secretive legal network called the Federalist Society, which was devoted to restricting privacy rights and reproductive freedoms, rolling back civil rights gains, and thwarting the authority of government to regulate industry in the public interest. In the Reagan administration, Federalist lawyers, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, William Bradford Reynolds, Theodore Olson, and Kenneth Starr in the Justice Department, Kenneth Cribb in the White House, and Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, among many others, worked to strip away civil rights, voting rights, and environmental and consumer protections, and to defend discriminatory practices by cities, local schools, and religious institutions. Reagan-appointed Federalist judges like Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Laurence Silberman did the same from the federal bench. After years of pitched battles over the selection of judges in the Reagan era, the elevation of Bork was seen as a way to turn back decades of liberal jurisprudence by tipping the balance on the high court toward the right for years to come." —Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 45