My Netroots Nationality

Very excited to be preaching the lessons of NIXONLAND [1]for progressives at Netroots Nation in Austin this year, July 17-20. Here's the press release [2], just out:

KRUGMAN, PERLSTEIN, ATRIOS, AND DIGBY ON MEDIA ACCOUNTABILITY AT NETROOTS NATION

According to Paul Krugman and Rick Perlstein, our media needs better accountability—and it's our job to step up.

So Netroots Nation is thrilled to announce that Perlstein, author of Nixonland, and New York Times columnist Krugman will team up with Duncan "Atrios" Black for a panel on media accountability on Friday, July 18. Heather "Digby" Parton will moderate.

In "How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backward to Please the Right," Perlstein will date the origins of three habits of the mainstream media to the late '60s: bending over backward to placate the right even at the expense of facts and good judgment, the pundits' obsession with boosting "post-partisanship," and a tendency to "balance" reports of Republican misdeeds by inflating supposed Democratic misdeeds.

Krugman will relate his own experiences as a columnist who refuses to abide by these unwritten rules.

"By programming news defensively and worrying about what a mythic 'Middle America' would think, media executives played right into the hands of the right, who skillfully indoctrinated the media into the notion that this 'Middle America' was always conservative," says Perlstein. "Thankfully, the Netroots makes it harder for the right to sustain that illusion."

We're thrilled to have these four experts leading a discussion about the importance of having access to fair and accurate information from the mainstream media. If you haven't registered, now's the time [3] (seriously).

And stay tuned for information about other sessions focusing on information access including panels on big telecom, reproductive rights and media coverage and war punditry.

And NN's Josh Orton informs me that this is the link [4] if you want to register at the reduced-rate hotel.