Prominent right-wing blogger John Cole speaks the truth and gives sage advice:

[Members of the media] may be offensive, in cases biased, and in cases all out jackasses (Linda Foley, Ted Rall, Eason Jordan, and others come immediately to mind), but, as a whole, they are not anti-military, and certainly not treasonous. If the media suffers from some Vietnam syndrome, so too does the right-wing, and the main symptom is an all-out hositility to all things media.

In fact, many in the media are downright flagwavers and damned patriotic, and in the case of some, outright jingoists. I have no problem attacking, by name, slimeballs (again, Eason Jordan and Ted Rall come to mind), but we have got to stop this generic smearing of the media. Most of them are doing their best to get it right. Just because they are rightly suspicious of the military establishment does not make them anti-military or anti-American.

So let’s stop these generic attacks on the media.

It gets even better when he talks about the right-wing victimology:

….And while we are at it, can we conservatives please stop this laughable cult of victimology? We have the Presidency (for the second time in a row and the fifth time in the last seven elections). We control the Senate by a ten seat margin. We control the House by a larger margin. We have dismissed or dismantled virtually every institutional check in order to limit opposition debate and increase institutional control, regardless how short-sighted that might be. We are ramming through just about every judge we wanted, and are about to reload the Supreme Court with Antonin Scalia at the helm.

We control dozens of governors offices and an equal number of state legislatures. We have hundreds of think tanks, hundreds of talk show hosts, hundreds of conservative columnists, millions of bloggers. We have dozens of partisan magazines and pundits, legions of 527’s and grass-roots organizations, and dozens of think-tanks. We have, ostensibly, our own damned cable news channel and so many right leaning editorial boards of newspapers I can’t even begin to count them. Memes that start in obscure blogs find their way onto the front page of allegedly liberal newspapers in the matter of two days.

We may be a lot of things, but persecuted victims we are not. To assert otherwise is to engage in a self-defeating flight of fancy that should be met with nothing short of outright ridicule.

Let’s remember that, and remember that the media is not the enemy and their attempts to report abuses by this government are not the problem. We will all be a lot better off if we do, and we can better address our own shortcomings (which are myriad) if we have a critical appraisal of who and what we are and what we are doing. Sure, Chris Matthews may be a sneering jerk at times and has difficulty presenting conservative positions. Tune in to Bill O’Reilly if you need a pat on the back. So you don’t like what the Washington Post wrote about Republicans. Pick up the Washington Times for that big wet kiss some apparently need. And so on and so forth.

Even if we do buy into the absurd supposition that the media is overtly hostile towards conservatives, I contend that their criticism would still be vital. An outside appraisal would be a good thing, particularly when you consider the self-referential and oft-delusional nature of our own manufactured media organs (National Review, for example) and the rest of the echo chamber that the right-wing blogosphere appears to be becoming. We are wasting out energy attacking what, in my mind, has been, overall, a pretty friendly media establishment as of late.

And just for fun, you might ask Move-On or Media Matters how liberal they think the media is. The answer might surprise you. So, some perspective, please.