Newfound Buddies?

I said that the WH Press Corps were the "newfound buddies of the Republicans" in the last post. I may have been wrong: it's not THAT newfound. Here's ThinkProgress:

As Media Matters has documented, during the Bush administration, the media consistently allowed conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives. The rationale was that Republicans were “in power.”

It appears that old habits die hard. Even though President Obama and his team are in control of the executive branch and Democrats are in the majority in Congress, the cable networks are still turning more often to Republicans and allowing them to set the agenda on major issues, most recently on the debate over the economic recovery package.

On Sunday, conservatives began an all-out assault on President Obama’s economic recovery plan, with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) both announcing that they would vote against the plan as it stood. Despite Obama’s efforts at good faith outreach, congressional conservatives have continued to attack the stimulus plan with a series of false and disingenuous arguments.

The media have been aiding their efforts. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that the five cable news networks — CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC — have hosted more Republican lawmakers to discuss the plan than Democrats by a 2 to 1 ratio this week.

In total, from 6 AM on Monday to 4 PM on Wednesday, the networks have hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times. Surprisingly, Fox News came the closest to offering balance, hosting 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. CNN had only two Democrats compared to 7 Republicans.

The drastically imbalanced coverage isn’t the first time that the news networks have effectively supported attacks on the recovery plans. As ThinkProgress reported on Monday, the cable networks, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts promoted a controversial CBO non-report 81 times before the actual CBO analysis of the stimulus plan was released.

I didn't transfer over the very nice chart they have, it would have broken the table here, but I urge you to check it out. The Republicans are clearly engaged in a full-court-press here, and the Dems (as usual) seem not to understand what they're dealing with.

Again, let's be clear. They want America to fail. They want to shake the country apart and build a new one from the pieces, since the only way they're ever going to get the change they want now is if they convince people that the Dems made things worse. They want things to get worse; far more than the Dems ever did under Bush. And, naturally, they'll make it worse still if they get back into power, since it was their institutional insanity that put America in this position in the first place.

That's the fight. Nothing less. That the media doesn't get it is their problem.