Deterring Democracy 3

MRC Watch Dept. - Series Intro: The excruciatingly narrow spectrum of opinion allowed in major media is a fundamentally conservative bias, but one the writers of the Media Research Center will certainly never acknowledge. Rather than trying to democratize media, they seek to even further constrict that spectrum. To deter democracy. A lot of the articles churned out by the MRC are merely devoted to scandalizing the fact that anyone who holds views with which the MRC disagrees is even allowed to offer such views in any media outlet.

This time around, it's Newsbusters contributor Tom Johnson. He spotlights an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Katrina Vanden Huevel, editor and publisher of the Nation, which challenges the "constrained notion of freedom that has dominated our politics since Ronald Reagan" and urges Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to offer "a far more expansive American view of what freedom requires, and what threatens it."

Johnson doesn't take issue with anything in the editorial; he merely highlights it, as if the fact that such views were even published is, in itself, a scandal.

An odd footnote: On the Newsbusters homepage, Johnson's article is promoted with the headline, "Katrina vanden Heuvel: Right’s 'Freedom' Brings Oligarchy, Corruption," yet the actual article's headline reads, "Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hillary Should Challenge the Right's 'Constrained' Idea of Freedom."

--j.


Previous entries in this series:

Deterring Democracy

Deterring Democracy 2


[This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog that disapproves of the Media Research Center's efforts to deter media democracy.]

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hillary Should Challenge the Right’s ‘Constrained’ Idea of Freedom - See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-johnson/2015/06/10/katrina-vanden-heuvel-hillary-should-challenge-rights-constrained-idea#sthash.Wyl4EtRw.dpuf

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hillary Should Challenge the Right’s ‘Constrained’ Idea of Freedom - See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-johnson/2015/06/10/katrina-vanden-heuvel-hillary-should-challenge-rights-constrained-idea#sthash.Wyl4EtRw.dpuf