D.D. Guttenplan, frequent contributor to The Nation and biographer of radical journalist I.F. Stone

I flipped on C-Span 2 at seven this morning to see Nation writer D.D. Guttenplan promote his hagiography of the Soviet agent and Communist camp follower I.F. Stone, to a group of aging Vermont radicals with similar political fantasies. In the  break, C-Span advertised its segment at 9 featuring Guttenplan’s boss, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, which turned out to be a panel promoting socialism along with a Nation collection of diatribes against the Bush years and the free market economy. In between there was a conservative French economist, Gary Sorman talking about his new book. Every time I watch C-Span I am struck by its fairness and by the fact that only a conservative Republican and private corporations could have created it. C-Span of course is owned by the private cable companies and is the design of Brian Lamb, a Nixon White House operative who was dispatched by Nixon in the early years of PBS to attempt to get its directors to obey the law that created it and make it “fair, objective and balanced” — to use the words of its authorization act. Of course, Lamb failed because liberals are closet totalitarians who can’t stand to have a conservative in the room. Witness the thirty year purge of conservatives from university faculties to just take one example.

There is not a single leftwing channel, network or institution — to call them liberal is an offense to language — whether it is MSNBC, CNN, or PBS, Air America, NPR, or Harvard that is capable of fairness or intellectual diversity or has the slightest interest in promoting it. There is hardly a leftwing intellectual who will support the practice of intellectual diversity. As an earnest of my own fairness, I will name three: Alan Dershowitz, Stanley Fish and Gerald Graff. Contemporary liberals are socialists and their instincts are totalitarian — which is expressed in their causes like single payer health care, and their sabotage of the war against Islamic fascists.