Liberals explicitly view the dissemination of news in America as a vehicle for left-wing indoctrination ... Fox News drives them nuts.

Ann Coulter in “Slander”

Memo to Eric Mathison:

Move on!

My colleague’s remarks last week reflected the dilemma of most liberals, who still haven’t recovered from the shock of the 2000 election.

Meanwhile, their Democratic Party seems able to do little more than attack President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress.

They have yet to offer a constructive, forward-looking agenda -- even with another mid-term election approaching.

[Recommended reading on this point is former Sen. Zell Miller’s A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat.]

Eric’s frustration at criticism of the mainstream (i.e., liberal) media was also apparent.

Yet it is the “alternative” media that liberals deride, such as Fox News, National Review and conservative talk radio, that today gives American voters “a choice, not an echo.”

At this point, having recently identified myself as “once a political prodigal who climbed back ‘up from liberalism,’” a brief personal history becomes appropriate.

I was raised on a farm by Republican parents in conservative southwestern Idaho, and attended a conservative evangelical Protestant college.

During my sophomore year, I was president of the campus Young Republicans -- ending my term by attending the 1964 Republican National Convention which nominated Barry Goldwater for president and started a political ground swell that put Ronald Reagan in the White House.

But President Johnson defeated Sen. Goldwater in a landslide that November, leaving me with “intellectual” doubts about the conservative cause.

The liberal views of fellow history majors began to influence my thinking, as did liberal professors.

Soon I was sliding down that slippery slope from which some never return.

After a year of graduate school, followed by disqualification for both Officer Candidate School and the draft because of my vision correction, I was working as a cub reporter for The Idaho Statesman in Boise.

Even in that newsroom, which had a predominately conservative circulation base, the sentiment among young reporters was increasingly liberal in the late 1960s and early 70s.

Attitudes among the local press corps were not unlike what Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for President Reagan, recalled from her days at CBS in What I Saw at the Revolution:

“My peers at the network, the writers and producers in their late twenties and thirties, thought of themselves as modern people trying to be fair. There are conservatives over here and wild lefties over there -- and us, the sane people, in the middle.

“If you made up a list of political questions -- should we raise taxes to narrow the deficit; should abortion be banned; should a morning prayer be allowed in the schools; should arms control be our first foreign-policy priority? -- most of them would vote yes, no, no, yes.

And they would see these not as liberal positions but as decent, intelligent positions. They also thought their views were utterly in line with those of the majority of Americans.

“In a way that’s what’s at the heart of our modern political disputes, a disagreement over where the mainstream is and what ‘normal’ is, politically and culturally.”

To be accepted as a credible journalist by one’s professional peers, even in a conservative state (and later in Alaska), meant viewing the world through liberal glasses.

This was not a job requirement but a subtle, eroding influence. Its full effect was realized in 1972 when I, by then working for a state agency, hit rock bottom by casting my vote for George McGovern.

Yet that exile in state government caused this prodigal to look back across the political divide and begin a long, slow return to the right -- a journey not completed until after the Reagan Revolution.

During those years, spent in or associated with several newsrooms, and since then, too, one dynamic became and remains indelibly clear.

A profound liberal bias permeates the news media and colors reporting at all levels, not just among the White House press corps, the New York Times and Washington Post, the “big three” networks -- and our Seattle dailies.

“Mainstream” journalists are not the impartial observers they claim to be.

This bias is exposed on-line daily at www.mediaresearch.org.

Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Des Moines, objected in a letter last week to the “myth that Medicaid pays for sex change operations. It does not.”

This raises a question of interest:

Why, if those funds are not used for such procedures, did she vote for an amendment (to SB 6386, the supplemental appropriation bill) that would have prohibited the use of state or federal medical assistance funds for sex-change operations?

Ralph Nichols’ views are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Robinson Newspapers. He can be reached at newsdesk@robinsonnews.com or 206-388-1857.