Bill Kristol, a neo-conservative in Washington quote ‘The press isn't quite as biased and liberal. They're actually conservative sometimes,’ Kristol said recently on CNN. Kristol told The New Yorker. ‘The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.’”
Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match--either in size, ferocity or commitment--for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

In a careful study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."

The right is working the refs. And it's working. Much of the public believes a useful but unsupportable myth about the so-called liberal media, and the media themselves have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop...
The right wing propagada machine has been able to convince us of these myths;

1. have helped create the myth that social security is failing, paving the way for the realization of one of the right's political wet dreams: privatization of social security
2. perpetuate conservative myths about wellfare and simultanously turn a blind eye to corporate wellfare
3. sensationalize street crime and ignore corporate crime
4. treat religious right groups such as the Promise Keepers with kid's gloves and thus help legitimize them in the public perception. Generally avoid reporting on the lunatic fringe of the right, such as militias, neo-Nazis and anti-abortion terrorists, and in particular, avoid examining the personal and ideological connections these groups have to the Republican party
5. created the perception that there is widespread popular opposition to affirmative action when in fact most people support it
6. all but ignore waste, mismanagment and corruption in the military-industrial complex, especially as it relates to the planned missile defense system
7. downplayed protests against the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO by portraying protestors as leftist fringe groups, communists and anarchists
8. report corporate PR as legitimate scientific research.