More echoes of Stalin's boots

Digby has a really good piece from the weekend that starts with Armstrong Williams and looks back over 30+ years of increasing media manipulation by the right. It includes lengthy quotes from a number of articles, among which the most telling are often those relating concerns about Nixon-era activities (which clearly pale by recent standards; e.g., Erlichman wasn't able to drive out Dan Rather, but...). His cheery summary take?

Today, that dream of control is fully realized. Republicans routinely bully any reporter or organization that doesn't play ball while they feed lots of juicy propaganda to their bought and paid for media like FOX, Rush, Drudge and The NY Post knowing that the story will work its way into the mainstream anyway. They created an entertainment model for news in which entertainment values superceded civic values and it attracted a different kind of person to the field. Over time, fewer and fewer reporters wouldn't play ball because those that refused were weeded out in a form of (un)natural selection. In the end, the survivors don't even know they are biased. They are so enmeshed in this system of celebrity punishment and rewards that their own self esteem is now drawn from their acceptability to the (Republican) establishment. And each and every day the partisan right wing media pushes the discourse a few inches further to the right.

Make all the claims of "liberal media bias" that you want, but there just isn't anything to equal this on the left, and I'm not sure we'd have the stomach for really building it (crazy humanists that we tend to be). This just ruined my lunch.