I saw this joker pop up on Miller the other day, and it struck me that his argument was almost too stupid bother breaking down. I haven’t bothered deconstructing Alterman’s ludicrous notion that a media consisting of Democratic journalists and Democratic editors owned by huge corporations is conservative because the ownership group of huge corporations is conservative because the entire premise is based on a silly myth: big business is opposed to big government.
Yes, there is a pay-to-play fee, such as the EU just stuck Microsoft with the other day. But big business and big government not only don’t have a fundamentally antagonistic relationship, they have a deeply symbiotic one. Remember the phrase “special interest group” and the many complaints that they run the government? Well, guess who most of those special interest groups are? Exactly, and big business, wielding big goverment as a weapon to beat down internal and external competitors, not to mention feeding off government as a primary customer, is perhaps the largest and most dependable fan of incessant government intervention in the economy outside the politicians themselves.
Of course, Alterman probably hasn’t figured out yet that the political spectrum extends outside Democrats and Republicans, so perhaps we should give the poor guy a break. If I ever happen to debate the doorknob – he smiles as if even he doesn’t believe what he’s saying – there’s going to be less left of him than there was after Sheikh Yassin got close and personal with the missile.
As always, I prefer an axiomatic approach, but Anti-Socialist Tendencies has the statistics for those who require such things to support their logic.