So-Called Liberal Media (SCLM)

Conservatives have long claimed a liberal media bias in the United States. President Richard Nixon often complained about the liberal media, and he made enemies in the press from 1972 until his resignation in 1974. The term “so-called liberal media” has been cited in print since at least 1974 and is frequently used by those who deny (hence “so-called”) that there is any bias.
   
Liberal journalist Eric Alterman came up with the initials “SCLM” for “so-called liberal media” in 2003.
 
     
Wikipedia: SCLM
SCLM may refer to:
. SCLM (Software Configuration and Library Manager), a set of programs for IBM mainframe computers.
. SCLM, So-Called Liberal Media — see Media bias in the United States.
   
Wikipedia: Eric Alterman
Eric Alterman (b. January 14, 1960) is an American journalist, author, media critic, blogger, and educator. His political weblog named Altercation was hosted by MSNBC.com from 2002 until 2006, moved to Media Matters for America until December 2008, and is now hosted by The Nation.
   
dKosopedia
SCLM
Abbreviation for the So Called Liberal Media.
Compare: MSM.
 
Balloon Juice Lexicon
SCLM – So-Called Liberal Media. Popularized by Eric Alterman in his book “What Liberal Media?”.
 
Urban Dictionary
SCLM
Acronym for “So-Called Liberal Media”.
“Like any classic Big Lie, the one about the SCLM is based on strategic calculation: calling the media liberal works.”
—Rick Perlstein, Columbia Journalism Review
by Molitor Feb 16, 2004
 
SCLM
So-Called Liberal Media. A reference to the media that places it in the context of the common right-wing assertion that the media have a liberal bias.
The SLCM did not have any commentaters from the Left on that show.
by media girl Jan 29, 2005
   
17 January 1974, Bluefield (WV) Daily Telegraph, pg. 4, col. 1:
Despite all his troubles, stemming from Watergate and the continuing, all-out effort fo some Democrats and the so-called “liberal” media hatchetmen to destroy him, Richard Nixon has a notable series of accomplishments behind him already in the Presidency.
   
6 August 1974, Zanesville (OH) Times-Recorder, pg. 4A, cols. 1-2:
It is encouragining that the FBI Director has not been swayed by the so-called “liberal” media and politicians who try to pass off the legitimate search for communist spies in this country as “witch hunts.”
     
9 October 1977, Long Beach (CA) Independent Press-Telegram, Letters to the Editor, pg. B3, col. 3:
The so-called “liberal media” cover extensively every incident involving the death of a policeman.
 
7 June 1985, Los Angeles (CA) Times, Table of Contents, pt. 1, pg. A2:
The so-called liberal media are under fire everywhere.
     
Google Books
American Media and Mass Culture:
Left perspectives
By Donald Lazere
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
1987
Pg. 77:
Even the so-called liberal media view such occurrences as “situations needing to be managed,” not as basic flaws in an unjust or inefficient economic and political system.
       
Google Books
Impact of Mass Media
By Ray Eldon Hiebert and Carol Reuss
White Plains, NY: Longman
1987
Pg. 430:
The essay then repeated the familiar litany of criticism against the so-called liberal media.
   
19 August 1992, Milwaukee (WI) Journal, Reader Views, pg. A18, col. 3:
The continual carping of conservatives about the so-called “liberal media” is puzzling and ironic First, if the media are both so powerful and so liberal why have we elected only one Democratic administration since 1964?
 
Google News Archive
27 August 1992, The Southeast Missourian (Cape Girardeau, MO), “Speak Out,” pg. 11A, col. 1:
I WISH THE Republicans would stop whining about the liberal media. I didn’t hear them complain when the so-called liberal media was hounding Bill Clinton about his personal life. Thank you.
 
Google Books
What Liberal Media?:
The truth about bias and the news
By Eric Alterman
New York, NY: Basic Books
2003
Pg. 2:
On a trip to Maine in January 2002, he quite conspicuously carried a copy of the best-selling book, Bias, by Bernard Goldberg, as if to the give the so-called “liberal media” — hereafter, SCLM — a presidential thumb in the eye.
   
Playback
What Liberal Media:The Truth About Bias and the Media (Basic Books)
Friday, 28 February 2003 17:00
by Eric Alterman
The existence of a staunchly liberal American media is something most people in this country accept as undeniable truth. And this sentiment was never more systematically and successfully brought to the public than with the publication of Bernard Goldberg’s now-infamous best-selling book, Bias. Somewhat in response to Goldberg’s sweeping charges, Eric Alterman brings us What Liberal Media? Hoping to sway readers in another direction, he argues that the “so-called liberal media,” or “SCLM,” does not exist.
     
Google Books
The Politics of Deceit:
Saving freedom and democracy from extinction
By Glenn W Smith
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley
2004
Pg. 90:
“The right is working the refs,” Alterman wrote. “And it’s working. Much of the public believes a useful, but unsupportable, myth about the SCLM [So-Called Liberal Media] and the media itself have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop.”