Free Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald

they cover, and the narratives they disseminate. For Halperin and Harris to acknowledge that our political press—long deemed by the right-wing noise machine and therefore the press itself to be the “liberal media”—is in fact guided and shaped by a right-wing filthmonger and lowly gossip is extraordinary.
    Indeed, Harris and Halperin explicitly acknowledge the incomparable influence that the right-wing smear machine now exerts over how the establishment press covers political issues:
     
The simultaneous stumble of the Old Media and the rise of the New have had a disproportionate impact on the two warring sides in American politics. While there are plenty of conservatives who have been singed (or even burned at the stake) by the Freak Show, on the whole, these changes have been beneficial for conservatives and bad for liberals, since the New Media overwhelmingly favors conservatives. There is no liberal equivalent of the Fox News Channel, or Rush Limbaugh, or the Drudge Report, all of which have significant audiences and a demonstrated ability to promote controversies and story lines that affect the Old Media.
     
    Imagine the uproar if Halperin and Harris instead had identified a figure associated with the Left—Michael Moore or an Air America personality—as the single most influential figure shaping coverage by the press, or if they had described a process whereby the most vicious ideologues on the Left, rather than the Right, can “promote controversies and story lines” virtually at will. Shrill protests over the “liberal media” would be even louder than they already are.
    Yet the duo’s confession that they and their colleagues march to the lowly, right-wing tune of Matt Drudge and the rest of the right-wing “personality-based attack” engines received little attention, and understandably so. After all, anyone who pays even minimal attention to how our media covers political figures is already well aware that they operate just as their Leader, Matt Drudge, does—namely, by reciting right-wing personality attacks designed to make liberals and Democrats appear to be weak and Republicans strong. The sleazy personality-based attacks churned out by the right wing are able to dominate our political discourse and our elections only because the establishment press so hungrily gorges on them and then spews them back, thereby establishing the dominant narratives that dictate how our political leaders are perceived.
    John Harris has gone far beyond mere words in recognizing that the political press is dominated by the sort of right-wing attacks in which Drudge specializes. In 2006, Harris announced that he was leaving his prestigious position at the Washington Post to found and serve as editor in chief for a new political daily newspaper, to be called The Politico.
    Harris quickly recruited some of the most establishment political journalists in the country to leave their positions and join The Politico, including Washington Post reporter Jim VandeHei and Time magazine White House correspondent Mike Allen. When The Politico was launched, VandeHei vowed to assemble “the best political reporting team in the country today and deliver the news the way people want it: fast, fair, and first.” But it quickly became apparent that The Politico would follow completely in Drudge’s footsteps, specializing in the types of right-wing personality-based attacks that, as Harris himself acknowledged, dominate our political discourse.
    The Politico is funded almost entirely by the Albritton Corporation, whose founder and CEO, Joseph Albritton, was a longtime right-wing fixture in Washington. And the publication hardly sought to conceal its leanings, as the Albritton Corporation named as The Politico ’s CEO Frederick Ryan, an official in the Reagan White House, longtime confidant of the Reagan family and the current chairman of the board of trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation.
    Virtually from the