It is well known that the mainstream media is one of conservatives’ biggest pet peeves. Almost all Americans- from the most conservative to the most progressive- acknowledge that the U.S. news media is biased against conservatism. As such, right-wingers regularly use the media as a punching bag, characterizing it as a tool of liberal extremists seeking to brainwash their unsuspecting audiences. Most recently, on the O’Reilly Factor’s Monday night broadcast this week, Bill O’Reilly slammed the mainstream media’s widespread praise of Jon Stewart, the retiring ultraliberal host of The Daily Show, holding up the eulogy-like accolades as evidence that the media is “overwhelmingly liberal.” Juan Williams, a liberal-leaning Fox News anchor, agreed with O’Reilly that the media has heavy leftist biases, saying, “I don’t know who you’re fighting here.” Nobody is willing to dispute the media’s progressive slant, even liberal members of the media themselves.

As matter of fact, in 2007 NBC- one of the more liberal news organizations- released a list of news media personalities is who had donated money to political causes. Among TV correspondents, more than 75% of the donors were liberal. The numbers were even more slanted when it came to newspaper and magazine reporters: 82 had donated to leftist causes while only thirteen identified with the Right. So apparently we can all agree that the majority of the news media is liberally biased. The question is, what are conservatives complaining about? Does it really matter if the person saying or writing the news is a conservative, a liberal or a moderate?

A little under a year ago, the American Press Institute published an intriguing study about how Americans get the news and how much they trust the media. The Press Institute’s research found that on a weekly basis a full 87 percent of Americans watch the news on television, 69% follow world events on their computers, 65% listen to the news on the radio, and 61% read print newspapers and magazines. The study makes clear that the vast majority (96 percent) of Americans follow the news, with a third of those surveyed keeping a close watch on the news “all throughout the day.” The survey also revealed that Americans tend to place a lot of trust in the news media; a staggering 87% of the populace at least moderately trusts the news they hear directly from news organizations. The upshot of all this is that the media is extremely powerful. It wields tremendous influence over public opinion, with nearly 9 in 10 Americans accepting as reality what they hear, read and see on the news. This is why conservatives are so concerned about the news media’s liberal biases. Since news consumers overwhelmingly accept everything they are told by the media, they let their guard down, allowing that liberal partiality to seep in and influence their personal views. This is a valid issue from the conservative standpoint.

Of course, leftist defenders of the “lamestream media” (thank you, Sarah Palin) have answers. First of all, there is Fox News, the sole major TV network with a rightward slant, which is somehow supposed to justify the half a dozen or more liberal networks. (When you support the Common Core education standards like most liberals do, it explains how you can make the mistake of thinking that one is the same as half a dozen.) But the argument against Fox really doesn’t hold any water at all if you examine the founding dates of all the major networks. BBC: October 18, 1922. CBS: September 18, 1927. NBC: February 21, 1940. ABC: June 15, 1945. NPR: February 26, 1970. PBS: October 5, 1970. CNN: June 1, 1980. MSNBC: July 15, 1996. FOX: October 7, 1996. That’s right, Fox News is the youngest of all the major news networks. As Fox Founder Rupert Murdoch says, Fox News has “given room to both sides, whereas only one side had it before.” Whether or not Fox’s news reports are affected by political bias, Fox News was formed as a response to the liberal ideology which had influenced all news for decades before its inception. If the other side is going to use biased media as a weapon, conservatives need to employ it too. But that certainly does not make it acceptable for the Left to continue its tradition of grossly tainted reporting.

This brings us to the liberals’ other defense of their news media. True, they acknowledge, the liberals control the news media. However, conservatives own the talk radio industry, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck attracting and “brainwashing” millions of daily listeners. Liberals, on the other hand, have never successfully gotten their collective foot in the talk radio door, and this supposedly levels out the media playing field. This claim, however, represents a big misconception about talk radio and news bias.

Talk radio is biased. The mainstream media is also biased. But that is where the similarities between the two types of media end. When someone tunes into The Rush Limbaugh Show or The Michael Medved Show, he or she knows exactly what to expect. Talk show hosts are unapologetically partisan and are admittedly trying to convince listeners that they are correct. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Talk radio is opinionated content packaged as opinion, not as factual reporting. The problem starts when opinion becomes packaged as news, which is what the prejudiced news media does. By pretending that their views about the news are the news, mainstream media reporters take away from their consumers the option of believing anything else. If Sean Hannity blames a government shutdown on President Obama and Senate Democrats, his listeners are aware that he is merely expressing his personal opinion and that other views on the subject may also be legitimate. But if a TV news correspondent reports that the government is temporarily unfunded “due to Congressional Republicans’ unwillingness to compromise,” that becomes a fact as far the 87% of viewers who trust the news are concerned.

The complaint conservatives have about the liberal media is not that it’s liberal; it’s that they claim to be stating facts while many of their facts are controversial, which by definition makes them opinions. We see this all the time with Israel. If a talk show host should choose to bash Israel (which conservative hosts rarely do), he is entitled to express his opinion, as warped as it may be. But when a major TV network (think CNN) or newspaper (like The New York Times) reports that Israel is wantonly killing innocent women and children, that is perceived as a news fact, just as much as it’s a news fact that Mario Cuomo died or that RadioShack went belly-up. In addition, the liberal media tends to promote news stories that are favorable to liberalism while downplaying those that flatter conservatism. For example, during the 2012 election cycle two tapes were released in close proximity to each other- one in which Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney insulted poor people and one in which Democrat Barack Obama endorsed the redistribution of wealth. The Romney tape received more coverage by ABC, CBS and NBC than the Obama tape by a shocking 13:1 margin. Romney never fully recovered from the release of his recording. Thanks to his friends in the media, Obama never even had to recover from his. At least when one chooses to listen to a talk radio show, he or she knows that one side of the issue is being harped on. On the other hand, those listening to or watching the news in September 2012 had no reason to believe the President had said something wrong. After all, the media did not make it seem very newsworthy.

One prime instance of liberal media trying to brainwash the public is the 2004 Memogate scandal, also known as Rathergate and the Killian documents controversy. On the September 8, 2004 broadcast of 60 Minutes Wednesday, CBS Anchor Dan Rather, at the time one of the most prestigious personalities in the television industry, displayed four memos that were critical of Republican President George W. Bush’s 1972-73 service in the Air National Guard, supposedly written in the 70’s by Bush’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, who was deceased by the time the controversy broke. The timing of the segment was not coincidental; Bush was in the midst of a heated reelection campaign against then-Senator John Kerry, and Rather hoped that the documents, which he claimed had been verified by CBS experts, would harm Bush at a critical juncture, less than two months before Election Day. The only problem was that the documents’ authenticity had in fact not been verified and the memos were proven to be forgeries mere days later. Unsurprisingly, the story that was supposed to air on 60 minutes that day- until Rather scrapped it in favor of the Killian documents story- was a segment about all that was going wrong in the Iraq war, also intended to undermine Bush. CBS declined to fire Rather, and he resigned of his own free will in March 2005. When’s the last time a conservative talk show host used forged documents to delegitimize President Obama?

CNN News Anchor Christiane Amanpour is another example of a liberal media personality seeking to espouse her personal political opinions in the guise of news. Although there are other media personalities who are more blatantly partisan than her, Ananpour is notable because of her frequent assertions that she is an impartial news reporter. Amanpour once claimed, “I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology… I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality.” She also once commented that as a good journalist “you give all sides a fair hearing, and you also make it absolutely clear what the facts are and what the truth is.” Yet on August 1, 2008 Amanpour compared the China-Tibet situation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, casting Israel in the role of the Chinese aggressor. She said this despite the fact that Tibet, unlike the PA, was a sovereign nation, and it was attacked by China for no legitimate reason, while the Palestinians started every war they ever had with Israel. In 2007, Amanpour likened Christianity’s influence on the western world to Islam’s influence on murderous regimes in the Middle East. Obviously, Amanpour is entitled to her opinions, just like Rush Limbaugh is entitled to his. But Rush Limbaugh never claimed to “stay away from ideology,” “stay in a fact based reality,” or “give all sides a fair hearing!”

This is the real problem with the liberal media. By marketing itself as opinion, talk radio gives people the option to agree or disagree with what the host believes. Thus, talk radio listeners are not “brainwashed” as claimed by progressives like Filmmaker Jen Senko, who produced a documentary called The Brainwashing of My Dad about how her father was supposedly brainwashed by conservative talk show hosts. Rather, it is the liberal news media- by inserting their own prejudices into what they call news reporting- who are brainwashing the unwitting public, a naïve 87% of which believes that American news reporting is actually objective.