Some Redeeming Features Found in Media’s Liberals

Reporting from deep within the steaming fetid cesspool of the Liberal Establishment, this is your depraved correspondent, shamelessly spewing his anti-family, anti-American garbage all over the decent people.

Enough already.

I don’t know about my fellow pinko, flag-burning colleagues, but I’m tired of ceding the moral high ground to the Dan Quayles and Pat Buchanans of the world.

We hear it in public comments, radio call-ins, political demagoguery; namely, that the “media” are co-conspirators in the plot to undermine everything that is good and just in society.

I heard it in a phone call from a man last week who, because I criticized Quayle for his “Murphy Brown” assessment of the L.A. riots, made me feel like the anti-Christ.

How do we fall into this trap?

Listen, bub, I call my parents every week and sometimes twice a week. I get weepy when they play the national anthem at the Olympics.

My editor, who also works in this den of liberal iniquity, frets when the job keeps him from getting to a school function at night. I’ve seen him skip his lunch hour while working a Saturday shift so he could make it to his kid’s soccer game.

Another colleague signed up for a literacy program and is teaching adults to read in his spare time.

Another one has coached Little League for years.

Another one just finished some charity work that benefited a youth shelter.

This is the Liberal Establishment you’re so afraid of.

Our problem is that we’re not very practiced in the art of self-defense. We know how to attack, either on the editorial pages or in certain stories, but newspapers traditionally have been willing to let readers and others attack them institutionally without firing back--the notion being that the public should be able to criticize without the newspaper always getting in the last word.

That’s all fine, but it seems we’ve somehow been cornered into being portrayed as the people without the values. We’re always the favorite whipping boys of whatever “values coalition” happens to be around.

Baloney.

I write a column criticizing a police officer for a specific incident, and the mail is predictable (Whom do I want protecting me in times of trouble--the cop or the crook?), as if faulting an individual officer in a single incident is tantamount to saying we shouldn’t have police.

Daryl F. Gates has this down to an art form. He has turned his face-saving crusade into a press vs. police issue, as if this or any other newspaper has called for the dismantling of the LAPD.

For his Us vs. Them scenario to work, however, Gates had to make people believe everyone at LAPD agrees with him. Lo and behold, now that he’s retiring and can no longer punitively deal with dissenters, some in the department have dared to challenge him. Note the lieutenant who said the department wasn’t prepared for the violence and that Gates “sold me down the river” for blaming him for poor riot response. Do you think that lieutenant would have reacted that way if Gates’ days were not numbered?

I doubt that anyone is now charging the lieutenant with being anti-police.

Similarly, I write a column supporting a gay person’s right to live in peace, and somehow that is translated by some readers into my having contempt for the American family.

Dan Quayle knows exactly how all this works. He lauds two-parent families, then gets chided in the media for the overall simplistic nature of his remarks and, voila , the media comes across as opposing two-parent families.

Meanwhile, Quayle and Bush score some points as being the moral bulwarks of society.

You know the list of other issues; pick any one you want from among a long list that includes prayer in schools, abortion, welfare.

The conservative states his case; the liberal his. And even though it’s politics and not morality, it’s the poor liberal sap who gets slapped with being valueless.

Oh, well.

I don’t know why I let these guys upset me.

But to our friends out there who feel compelled to swathe themselves in vestments of morality while bashing the press, a word:

You may have met the enemy, but it ain’t us.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.