Howard Kurtz Reminds Us Again In Gun Control Fight Why Citizens United Is Needed Counterweight to Media

This past year we have seen the media put " religious liberty " in scare quotes and frame the HHS contraception mandate as fight over birth control or even a war on contraception. We saw how Andrea Mitchell of NBC took it upon herself  to go after the Komen CHARITY because they would not fund her buddies in Planned Parenthood.

Now we have this  from Howard Kurtz himself !! :
There was certainly a media agenda during the battle for civil rights in the late 1950s and 1960s. Television helped shine a spotlight on Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other Southern politicians who were fighting to preserve a segregationist society. News organizations were accused of being liberal, but they were on the right side of history in exposing practices that were fundamentally wrong. Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus would have been for naught had the media not made her a symbol of racial injustice.



In more subtle fashion, the media have led a national conversation about gay marriage, which as recently as 2004 was deemed politically unthinkable. Now it is legal in nine states, the last three of which adopted new laws in popular referenda last month. Again the press was accused of taking the liberal side, but sometimes that consisted of interviewing newly married gay and lesbian couples, who didn’t seem threatening to anyone. Whether the media changed the culture or lagged it, they were not missing in action.

Read the whole link.

No matter what your views are on gun control what Kurtz is saying should perhaps raise some alarm bells. It might be different if the United States had a real advocacy media like we see in Europe perhaps. That is various media outlets in the print world take and present the news through a certain viewpoint. However in the United States we don't have that. In fact there are few cities left that have more than one newspaper nowadays.

Events like this  remind me more and more why I supported the Citizens United Supreme Court opinion. It's a necessary counterweight to the media folks that because of their First amendment rights are able to to basically lobby ( as Kurtz admits they are doing ) while other are handicapped.