One thing that the right wing has been particularly good at over the past several years is getting the meme out there and into people’s heads that the “main stream media” (or MSM) is hopelessly liberal and skewed. That idea is what’s led to the somewhat-mystifying success of Fox News, which calls itself “fair and balanced” when anyone with more than three functioning brain cells can see that it is neither fair nor balanced.

This idea has gotten to the point where the media is gun-shy about calling people out when they deserve it. The Bush Administration people have done shocking things to the nation, simply casting aside such time-honored traditions as needing a warrant prior to searching someone’s home or listening in on their phone calls, “rendition” and the right to have court proceedings and a trial prior to being locked into prison, torture, habeous corpus, and so forth.

Rather than boldly reporting the news for what it is- a reversal of over 230 years of American democracy, human rights, and the rule of law- the media wimps out and tries to present both “sides” to the story. They’ll get some apologist for the right wing on and present those views as though they have some kind of legitimacy.

It’d be like if they had presented news on apartheid by putting forward Nelson Mandela and then getting some shill for the racists who used to run South Africa to present the “counter” view. Sorry, it’s just wrong, and there’s absolutely no problem in presenting the news straight up that way.

So it was awfully refreshing to see this segment from MSNBC’s show “Hardball” the other day:

Give it a watch. It’s several minutes long, but this moron who tries to say that Scooter Libby is like the dead soldiers in Iraq and that we mustn’t leave him behind (ie, we need to give him a full Presidential pardon) gets pretty well drilled by the guest host, David Schuster.

The media needs to do more of this. Granted, this is more of a talk/opinion show than a “hard news” show, but there’s no reason for these conservative flacks to go out there and express their outrageous viewpoints without being challenged and called out on them.