Inventing the wheel and taking it

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 8:05 AM on February 21, 2006.

First the report, then the action...

Last week Echo Chamber featured a Media Matters report revealing that, shockingly!, Sunday morning talk shows skew Right.

Less than a week later MoveOn has leapt to action with a fix. In The Monday Project, "MoveOn Media Action members watch the Sunday morning political talk shows, report any imbalance they see, and on Monday we push back together against the biggest outrage."

This week's action targets NBC's Meet the Press (sometimes referred to as Press the Meat): "The panel featured conservative columnist Paul Gigot (Wall Street Journal), progressive columnist Maureen Dowd (New York Times), neutral journalist David Gregory (NBC), and Mary Matalin—a Republican operative and top political adviser to Dick Cheney, who was allowed to dominate the discussion."

The media is less Conservative or Liberal than it is Capitalist. If Sunday shows have skewed Right it's probably the result of the Right's knack for organizing and being a squeaky wheel. The networks respond to audience demands. MoveOn's 3 million members, if properly mobilized, can become a formidable progressive squeaky wheel of their own.

This is exactly the kind of coordination that can help build on the work and ideas that are out there instead of just grabbing arguments, messages and actions willy-nilly and tossing them into the ring, waiting for the one that'll stick.

It's not as though progressives keep reinventing the wheel, we just seem to want to walk...

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.