Rick Perlstein: Progressives: Stop Being Suckers

You can watch me, Digby, Paul Krugman, and Atrios yap about how the media learned to bend over backward to please the right here.

I told one of my favorite stories from the book: the media's trauma after the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, when they believed themselves to have revealed to the nation a moral outrage—cops indiscriminately beating up both defenseless anti-war protesters and defenseless reporters and cameramen—then watched, helplessly, as the nation side with the police. It brought on a bout of morbid self-obsession among the media, as its mandarins tied themselves in knots wondering if they were showing contempt for "the heartland," and displaying "liberal bias," if they reported accurately about police abuses.