Leader of the Pack

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

--Thomas Jefferson

The Pew Research Center study of the American electorate says this about the dominant elite group:

Liberals have swelled to become the largest voting bloc in the typology. Liberals are opponents of an assertive foreign policy, strong supporters of environmental protection, and solid backers of government assistance to the poor. This affluent, well-educated, highly secular group is consistently liberal on social issues, ranging from freedom of expression to abortion.

Liberals are 19% of the electorate. As I noted earlier, liberals are our national leadership, dominating five of nine national institutions: the media, government bureaucracies, entertainment and the arts, academe, and philanthropy/nonprofits.

The media dominates this power line-up to the degree that elected Democrats are mere foot soldiers in the media-led army. No wonder the conservative blogs are all about the MSM (mainstream media), and liberal blogs are all about divisions among Democrats. The MSM is more unified than the Democrats, at least until those Democrats still shaky about the need to leave Iraq are brought into line.

Conservatives have it right. Republicans’ principal enemy is the MSM, with its “out-of-Iraq, down-with-Bush” agenda, powered by the full force of its Jefferson-inspired “newspapers without government” worldview. That’s why The New York Times, not the administration, in wartime decides whether or not the world needs to know about how we monitor terrorist financial transactions.