Back a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about CNN, and Walter Isaacson’s ill-advised meeting with the Republican leadership in Congress to try to determine how CNN could better appeal to conservative viewers.

A few days later, I spotted an article in the paper which pointed out that in Europe, the media is openly and unabashedly biased in one direction or another, and makes no bones about it. The writer noted that the balance came, not from the "even-handed" middle-of-the-road coverage that was once the standard in America, but from different sources offering different slants on the same story. In Europe, such advocacy outlets tend toward the newspapers (Le Figaro and Le Monde in Paris, for example) and radio, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t apply to television, particularly now when there are hundreds of channels available.

The writer suggested that Isaacson was taking the wrong tack, not by being biased, but by being biased in a direction where the market is already saturated. Faux News already has the right wing audience tied up, and the networks are still targeting the squishy middle. Why, she asked, doesn’t CNN target the left?

Right wingers, of course, like to claim that CNN is already leftist. Those of us on the left, of course, beg to differ. Tom Tomorrow, who routinely has brilliantly funny political cartoons, had one recently showing the "liberal bias" of CNN over the past few years, including the numerous commentaries from Noam Chomsky on globalization, or the refusal of the network to discuss the unsubstantiated rumors about Clinton, preferring instead to discuss campaign finance reform.

You remember all that, right?

You don’t?

Really?

Gosh!

CNN was right-of-center, perfectly willing to let the think tanks and broadcast adjuncts of the far right to set the tone over the past decade.

Since, despite all the self-pitying caws from the right, there in fact is no mainstream leftist media outlet in America. So the many of us who don’t think Rush Limbaugh is God have taken up getting our information from foreign news services. On the net, the best, and fastest-growing source, is the Guardian of London (http://www.guardian.co.uk) which tells us considerably more about what is going on in America than our own print media, and far more than the swill they serve on the networks and cable.

It was fun spending a minute or two imagining CNN targeting the left. I’m sure that Tom Tomorrow felt a pang of longing as he eviscerated the right wing propaganda that CNN is liberal.

Then reality set in. CNN is an organ of Time Warner / AOL. The over-privileged suits that run CNN aren’t going to be interested in championing the cause of worker’s rights, or presenting open and honest debate about globalization (it’s particularly infuriating when CNN dismisses arguments against globalization as being too complex and involving too many different groups, each with their own, confusing agenda; the whole issue can be boiled down to one sentence: Power is shifting from nations to corporations, and the 99.9% of us who aren’t the direct beneficiaries of this want to make sure that our rights and quality of life aren’t erased in the process).

CNN, adjunct of the corporate power matrix, would be about as convincing a left wing voice as Leona Helmsley.

The very nature of television media, with it’s millionaire "star journalists" and its need to appease both corporate owners and corporate sponsors, pretty much guarantees that in its current incarnation, it will never present a left-wing philosophy.

There was a special on CBS last week that was a compilation of great moments in American journalism. CBS, with its legacy of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, was once the epitome of what media journalism was all about, and there were some great moments they could present; Murrow’s interview with Senator Joseph MacCarthy, the MacCarthy-Army Hearings, the Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, up to Dan Rather’s trek through Afghanistan.

They even hauled old Uncle Walter out to reminisce about the way it was, and Cronkite, who is still sharp as an Aaron Sorkin dialog, carefully spoke in the past tense only. One of Cronkite’s more enduring traits was that he was never sloppy with his grammar. I would love to hear some unedited reflections from that man.

It was, on the whole, a sad performance. The special couldn’t disguise the fact that, aside from some examples of personal bravery by journalists in war zones (such as Bernard Shaw and Christine Amanpour, and they carefully didn’t mention what either of them were doing these days), American journalism had, during the eighties, become a sad shadow of itself. With all the self-congratulatory pats on the back for Watergate, MacCarthy, Vietnam and the civil rights movement, all they could come up with for a dramatic and defining moment in domestic news coverage in the nineties was Steve Kroft’s pathetic "caused my marriage pain" interview with Candidate Clinton and Hillary. That, apparently, was considered the highlight of American domestic journalism for the decade.

There was a time when a special on how great American journalism was would be both unnecessary and unthinkable. Self-promotion of that sort was considered at best gauche and at worst unethical. Of course, that was back before news departments became part of the ratings race and found themselves answering to Marketing.

The problem is institutional. It stems from the mad libertarian rush to empower "businessmen" – in reality, large corporations – allowing them to utilize imaginary rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy (the Founders did NOT have corporations in mind when they incorporated those rights in the Constitution) while protecting them from the scantest of liability. As a result, these entities have taken over our communications and are attempting to finish the process with our government. Corporations aren’t particularly leftist, and tend to oppose any social program that might reduce their control over the lives of their employees and customers.

Corporate news in America is institutionally incapable of presenting a leftist point of view. It will not happen, not in a million years.

If a leftist station is to be created, there are several ways in which it will have to differ from any other news cable channel.

It will have to be supported by subscriber dues or fees. It’s going to have to be both safe from takeover by the corporations and grass roots. It means at least one million subscribers at $50 a year, or five million subscribers at $10 a year.

The polls suggest there are some 60 million liberals and leftists in America – at least one quarter of the adult population. The percentage might be considerably higher if people have an alternative to the endless waves of corporate propaganda that have replaced our news.

If we can get one in twelve of those people to cough up $10 a year, we’ve got our funding. People are so used to having the corporations put out vast amounts of money for their glitzy displays that we’ve forgotten that we can do it ourselves. Where do we think the corporations got that money in the first place? It came from us.

We need to lose the mind set that our anchors can be bubble-brained millionaires who are there only to read the script. Most of our anchors, including the ones who like to call themselves journalists, are overpaid jerks who no longer care about any of the issues that the average guy does. Dan Rather is going to be a lot more interested in what the NASDAQ did than he is about legislation raising the minimum wage. He isn’t going to raise the issue that TV news is the stock report – and nothing else but crap. We need to have anchors who aren’t corporate-owned; anchors that won’t be afraid to frown at the stuff Putsch pulls.

An amazing number of Americans have absolutely no idea what the left stands for. They believe what Rush Limbaugh tells them, and Rush Limbaugh is a well-paid liar. I see it every week: some dittohead, serenely confident of his ability to beat "libruls," shows up on the web, starts a debate with some liberals or leftists, and quickly discovers that people hold those views for a reason, and not just to annoy Rush. What’s more, we’re more than capable of defending and advocating those views.

Still, that’s blue-sky at this point, although I devoutly hope we have something in place for the 2004 campaign. With the spread of high speed connections and broadband, it’s possible that this network might exist on the net, which is why my estimate of the annual costs above is so low.

In the meantime, our web presence keeps growing by leaps and bounds. Five years ago, there was maybe two dozen liberal web sites. Now there are tens of thousands. Strong liberal voices are appearing all over the web. Five years ago, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower were about the only publically accessible liberal voices around, and they are still the best, but they are hardly alone.

We’ve even reached the point where the right wing media has realized that we are a threat to their monopoly on information. Online Journalism sniffed that Salon commentators and other liberal web pundits weren’t "real journalists" because they don’t go out and get their information first hand. As if any of the Sabbath Gasbags or the Radio Noises do. And the Rich White Trash at the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page recently started attacking liberal websites by name, starting with Buzzflash.com, who of course were thrilled by the attention. (Maybe Dr. John could write a song about that: "Oh, I ain’t appeared; ‘till I been smeared; in the Op Ed of the WSJ")

Liberalism is alive and well in America, and getting stronger by the day.

The corporations are going to learn what every other wannabe despot in history has had to learn: you can’t keep free people, and their ideas, captive for long.