There's American television news more left than Current TV?
There isn't. That's the whole problem.
The face-palm was more about the fact that many Americans
think you can't get more left than Current TV without removing yourself from the "mainstream".
I think you forgot the Socialist Party programming that Axl watches at 3 am.
You can't tell me that such a program, if it existed, wouldn't be a hundred times better than the corporate pap you see on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC - celebrity garbage, government propaganda (there's Rachel Maddow waving the flag in Afghanistan!), inane tweets and narcissistic media navel-gazing.
Good article by David Sirota on how removed corporate media is from traditional notions of journalism:
A journalism-free news media
This [...] is why a disproportionate amount of “news” today isn’t actually about expensive-to-report events and stories happening in the real world. It’s more often than not the cheap-to-report reaction (or reaction-to-a-reaction) to some outburst uttered by non-journalists in the media bubble. Think:
Geraldo Rivera on Trayvon Martin, Rush Limbaugh on Sandra Fluke, and
Bill Maher on Limbaugh on Fluke. In other words, in a journalism-free news media, news is most often what Daniel Boorstin famously called a “spectacle” — events, controversies and scandals almost wholly conjured by the media itself.
This is what you get when the chief decision driving news coverage is the profit motive.
You need to take into account that the American Left is different than the left in most countries. If the American Left was like the Left in other countries, it would have absolutely no success whatsoever with the exception of a few areas such as San Fransisco and Vermont. In order to have any success and bring about progressive change, they have to adopt to the fact that the United States is a center-right nation.
We hear the "centre-right nation" canard all the time, but the facts don't really bear it out. The majority of Americans support Medicare and Social Security, want the nation to withdraw from foreign wars, etc.
Over 90% of Americans disapprove of Congress. There's a huge alienation from a government that clearly isn't working for the majority.
The American left placed its hopes in Obama, who (like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter) governed from the right. But so did independents - and that's the key. Obama rode a general revulsion against the right-wing policies of Bush to victory. Clearly people wanted something different, and it wasn't cautious corporate centrism. The whole theme of Obama's campaign was "change", and even though it was a cynical marketing strategy, it clearly appealed to a deep yearning in people for something different.
In the end, people just want concrete results that will better their living situation. If leadership is lacking on the left, they'll keep turning to the right.
