Blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com is now a very popular conservative, partly because CNN chose to employ him as a political contributor. The network chose him to represent conservatives on its network even though:
he referred to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Marxist harpy wife,”
he called former Obama spokeswoman Linda Douglas “the Joseph Goebbels of the White House Health Care shop,”
he smeared retired Justice David Souter a “goat f*&king child molester,”
he labeled the Democratic National Convention, “The Vagina Monologues.”
Yes, despite all that, Erickson has a job at CNN and has become quite popular.
When he was hired by the network, first as a contributor to the old John King, USA program, CNN’s political director said Erickson was “an agenda-setter whose words are closely watched in Washington” 
and that, “as a person who still lives in small-town America, Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach.”
So, Washington pays attention to this guy and this guy is in touch with those small-town folks and CNN thus blesses his noxious rants with legitimacy.
And I’m afraid that in that formulation we can find the reason our divisions in America are so deep and so bitter.
You see, because Erick Erickson does speak for some people, some conservative people, he does get attention, even, I’m sorry to admit, in Washington, D.C. But because CNN, which used to be a first-class news organization, gives him a platform that reaches millions of people, he gets much more attention than he deserves.
And so it is with most of what is now being called the “conservative media complex,” of which Erick Erickson’s RedState is a small part. Without help from more mainstream outlets, like CNN, these corrosive conservative voices would have a limited impact on our discourse, beyond selling their ideological trinkets to a relatively small but gullible audience.
A larger part of that conservative media complex, Fox “News,” is also given undeserved credibility by mainstream news outlets, which, just because there are some real journalists working there, treat Fox as a completely legitimate journalistic enterprise, thus damaging the brand of all.
About three years ago, bona fide reporters, like Jake Tapper of ABC News, came to the aid of Fox, as the White House was pushing back against the network and accusing it, accurately, of being “a wing of the Republican Party.” Tapper referred to Fox as “one of our sister organizations.”
Some sister.
Enabling Fox to do what it does—which is to provide part of the country with its own set of facts, facts that happen to support the conservative agenda of the Republican Party, and facts that often don’t happen to be the facts that the rest of us understand as facts—is part of why there were a lot of conservatives who woke up on November 7th and couldn’t believe their eyes: Barack Obama is still alive!
Our country has always been divided in various ways, but never have we had anything like a Fox “News,” a large-scale enterprise that not only broadcasts our differences, which would be okay, but it magnifies them, exploits them, and then profits from them.
While there have been a multitude of examples that I could cite to back up this claim, none of them are as stark, as telling, as what has been happening on that network since Mitt Romney first shamefully tried to exploit the tragedy in Benghazi.
In fact, as I write this, Fox is featuring the nutty right-wing congressman Louie Gohmert, who is unashamedly calling for a “special prosecutor” to investigate what happened in Benghazi, even though there are already investigations going on all over the place.
But Gohmert was really on the network to promote a group called “Special Operations Speaks,” which claims to have 100,000 signatures on a petition, the title of which is:
Special Operations Speaks DEMANDS an Independent Investigation to Uncover Potential High Crimes and Misdemeanors in Benghazigate
In case that doesn’t make clear the motives of this right-wing group that purports to represent “the Special Operations community,” how about the group’s logo, complete with the universal symbol for Obama haters:
______________________________
Having Gohmert on this morning is just another attempt by Fox “News” to commodify ignorance, and, perhaps more important for its profitability, to undermine and delegitimate President Obama.
In fact, things have gotten so bad on Fox, that this morning even Geraldo Rivera went on the network and called the latest claim by Foxers—that David Petraeus was essentially forced to cover for the Obama administration because of the investigation over his extra-marital affair—”absolutely reckless, and it has no fact base at all and really is a disgrace to a man who has served us honorably.”
“No fact base at all,” says Geraldo, yet the beat goes on, and on.
And the vitriol continues to flow.
As do the profits for the father of Fox, Rupert Murdoch.
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 
Jim Wheeler
/ November 16, 2012The very pillars of our government would crumble without a free press, of that I have no doubt. How ironic then, that yellow, corrupt journalism should be trying to undermine its proper role. It feels like Armageddon.
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Jane Reaction
/ November 18, 2012Jim, the game is up when a half-dozen media moguls rule the airwaves. Ponder how much undisclosed money went into the pockets of the MSM from the $6 Billion election of 2012, for one example.
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Jim Wheeler
/ November 18, 2012Right, JR. The talking heads like to pretend the Mainstream Media are left-leaning, but the truth is they are Money-leaning. And Citizens United sure didn’t help, eh? Shades of William Randolph Hearst!
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