The Growing Divide

There's a really good article over at CounterPunch about the growing divide in America today. As our nation continues to slide off its gilded rails, a lot of people are headed to one corner or the other. We're losing our ability to find common ground.

Today, there is simultaneously a growth of the right and greater appeal of socialist and other progressive politics among a broader swath of the population than in decades. In other words, there is a political polarization on the ground, but the mass media, including its liberal wing, only focus on one end of it — the right.

For example, a multiracial gathering of 15,000 people showed up in Detroit this summer for the US Social Forum (USSF). Thousands of students, workers and unemployed people attended days of workshops, rallies and a mass book fair to better understand the world and how to change it. No network or newspaper gave it the kind of attention one would assume a mass gathering of radicals might warrant.

The USSF was sandwiched in between the two largest weekend socialist gatherings in years in this country, Socialism 2010, that drew nearly 1,700 people to dozens of workshops and meetings on everything from the ABCs of Marxism to Breaking the Siege of Gaza. The fact that a Tea Party conference of 600 received coverage from every network and cable news station says a great deal about the indifference toward the the politics of many Black, Brown and working-class white people in this country.

The One Nation rally called by the NAACP and the labor movement on October 2 drew more than 100,000 people and probably more given the bumper-to-bumper bus traffic coming in from NYC that prevented most attendees, including myself, from gathering all at once. Yet, with few exceptions, the news outlets were busy dashing off to cover the latest ravings of the right...

So why is the mainstream media focusing almost exclusively on one corner and not the other? What do you think?