Who Controls the Media?

One writer at the NY Daily News thinks it's the conservatives who are actually running things:

It's hard to know where to begin in dismantling the Republican canard that Democrats control the media. Fox News is the most popular 24-hour news network by a whoosh and a cachung. Rush Limbaugh is the most powerful radio host, and lots of little Limbaughs line up behind him. Sarah Palin is the biggest media-political crossover star. And in an increasingly fragmented Internet, the Drudge Report continues to drives more political traffic than any other website. In italics and bold, to boot.

I don't begrudge conservatives this success. It speaks to message discipline and to feeding tasty food to a hungry audience. An audience that is right of center, which left-wingers far too often fail to acknowledge.

But on top of all this real-world evidence of right-wing media primacy is even more compelling evidence that there's no such thing as a Dominant Liberal Media Elite: You can't control the conversation if you don't control the language.

The New York Times doesn't decide what words we use, nor does CNN or NPR. Our political vocabulary comes from the mouths of crafty conservatives, and that's the ultimate proof that they steer the conversation.

He then goes on to describe how conservatives have gotten certain terms into the vocabulary, like "Obamacare", "pro-life" and "apology tour" (and let's not forget "death panels").

While conservatives are directing a lot of the conversation, you can't look at the reporting and slant the mainstream media gives most stories and claim that's coming from conservatives. We may be creating some of the language, but until I start hearing conservative ideas promoted by the mainstream media instead of being ridiculed and mocked, you can't convince me that conservatives are controlling the mainstream news and opinion organizations.

And apparently I'm not the only one who thinks this way. The readers of the article were polled with this question: