Mr. Levin is a conservative commentator and pundit. This is his political opinion and not a statement of fact. He is not a legitimate factual news source. He is rehashing the neo-conservative view and that of the McCain campaign that the media is out to lynch Mrs. Palin. Legitimate news media is out to get the concrete facts of her views, positions and her record, which the American public has every right to know, despite the efforts of the campaign to insulate her.

For all their economic clout and cultural sway, the ten great multinationals profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the moment. The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested whole. But while the players tend to come and go--always with a few exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder, brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street, in countless homes, in every other head.
The rise of the cartel has been a long time coming (and it still has some way to go). It represents the grand convergence of the previously disparate US culture industries--many of them vertically monopolized already--into one global superindustry providing most of our imaginary "content." The movie business had been largely dominated by the major studios in Hollywood; TV, like radio before it, by the triune axis of the networks headquartered in New York; magazines, primarily by Henry Luce (with many independent others on the scene); and music, from the 1960s, mostly by the major record labels. Now all those separate fields are one, the whole terrain divided up among the giants--which, in league with Barnes & Noble, Borders and the big distributors, also control the book business. (Even with its leading houses, book publishing was once a cottage industry at both the editorial and retail levels.) For all the democratic promise of the Internet, moreover, much of cyberspace has now been occupied, its erstwhile wildernesses swiftly paved and lighted over by the same colossi. The only industry not yet absorbed into this new world order is the newsprint sector of the Fourth Estate--a business that was heavily shadowed to begin with by the likes of Hearst and other, regional grandees, flush with the ill-gotten gains of oil, mining and utilities--and such absorption is, as we shall see, about to happen.
By Mark Crispin Miller
https://www.thenation.com/doc/20020107/miller

This article appeared in the January 7, 2002 edition of The Nation.
December 20, 2001
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I was born and raised in Chicago, so my attitude toward politicians is from my experience with the "Daley Machine"

Democratic political machine
Richard Joseph Daley (May 15, 1902 – December 20, 1976) served for 21 years as the undisputed Democratic boss of Chicago and is considered by historians to be the "last of the big city bosses." He played a major role in the history of the Democratic Party, especially with his support of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and of Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

Daley was Chicago's third mayor in a row from the working-class, heavily Irish American Bridgeport neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, and he lived there his entire life.

Daley had two bases of power, serving as Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee from 1953, and as mayor of Chicago from 1955. He used both positions until his death in 1976 to dominate party and civic affairs. Daley's well-organized Democratic political machine was often accused of corruption and though many of Daley's subordinates were jailed, Daley was never personally accused of corruption. He is remembered for doing much to avoid the declines that some other "rust belt" cities like Cleveland and Detroit experienced during the same period. He had a strong base of support in Chicago's Irish Catholic community, and he was treated by national politicians such as Lyndon B. Johnson as a preeminent Irish American, with special connections to the Kennedy family.

Richard M. Daley, the current and second longest-serving mayor of Chicago, is his son.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Daley

All politicians lie all the time, and reporters aren't too far behind. I know the Conservative Politix Examiner is getting paid by some lobbying group. Who do you pay to do your thinking for you?