Liberal = Left?

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:07 PM -0500 3/19/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated Tue, 19 Mar 2002  3:43:10 PM Eastern Standard
>Time, David Bergdahl <einstein at FROGNET.NET> writes:
>
>>  Remember how after the fall of the Berlin Wall, suddenly, the communists
>>  were seen as "conservative" and the free-marketeers "progressive," reversing
>>  historical norms?  At the time I was told that left was future-oriented and
>>  right past-oriented so the labels were fairly used.  I doubted it, arguing
>>  that "left" was used for "my favorite position" by journalists.
>
>You pose an interesting chicken-and-egg question.  Assuming for the
>sake of argument that the media really does have a "left-wing bias",
>does that mean that most journalists subscribe to a range of
>political beliefs already known as "left-wing", or does that mean
>that said range of beliefs is called "left-wing" because journalists
>already believe in it?
>
I have at least two problems with the assumptions underlying this:

1) If such journalists existed, they wouldn't refer to their beliefs
they favor as "left-wing" because at least in this country
"left-wing", like "liberal", has long been a derogatory term.
"Progressive" is used instead, and various and sundry circumlocutions.

2) You must be reading different journalists that I do.  By the
standards of most of the "civilized world", virtually no left-wing
journalists exist in the mainstream media.  They do exist, but in
places like "Mother Jones", maybe "The Village Voice", and various
alternative weeklies in various cities.  Not in the New York Times,
the Washington Post, etc. etc.  No left-wing paper would have
supported Gore or Bush in the last election, and none of the
mainstream papers supported anyone else.  Ergo...

>To end with a partisan play on words, liberal = tax-and-spend =
>liberal with the taxpayers' money.
>
>     - Jim Landau

While conservative [as used at least since Reagan] = borrow-and-spend
= liberal with the taxpayers' and the taxpayers' offspring's money.
Since this is a list on, at least in part, the meaning of lexical
expressions, I would hope that expressions as inherently biased as
"tax-and-spend" not go unanalyzed.

larry