Of course, the GOP candidates who were most vocal about the supposed media bias were really just using it to dodge substantive questions and get easy applauses from the partisan crowd. As Charles Pierce puts it in Esquire:

I have come to the conclusion that it is very easy to be a Republican presidential candidate. First of all, to paraphrase J.R. Ewing, once you give up truth, the rest is a piece of cake. Second, and most important, you really only have to memorize one answer.” (i.e it’s the Liberal media!).

When confronted about his voting record in the Senate, Marco Rubio (R-FL) was quick to call out the media bias, after mentioning that President Obama had an abysmal voting record during his campaign as well. “This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservatives,” he said, to a crowd of cheering conservatives. He even went on to say that Clinton has her very own super PAC in the mainstream media, a point that may have very well won the debate for the young conservative.

Seeing the advantage in attacking the much-loathed media, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded to a question on whether his opposition to compromise on the debt limit shows he is not a “problem solver.”

“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” said Cruz, who would use his time to trash the moderators instead of answering the question, “This is not a cage match.” He went on to mock the Democratic debate as a battle between the “Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,” which seems to imply that the media is not only liberal, but communist.

So, is the mainstream media really left-wing, or even liberal, as those on the right love to claim?

First of all, it should be noted that the real world tends to have a liberal bias — at least what Cruz considers a liberal bias. Take climate change, for example. The fact that the climate is warming because of human activity is a completely uncontroversial notion; it is happening, and the vast majority of scientists agree that it will be catastrophic for humanity if nothing is done very soon. That the mainstream media does not contest the issue of climate change, or claim that it is some giant left-wing conspiracy, does not prove it is liberal, but that it is operating in reality. Cruz does not operate in reality, and believes climate change (i.e. science) is a “religion.” But just because Cruz believes this, or his deranged father, Rafael, believes that evolution is a communist lie, does not mean that evolutionary biologists are communists or that climate scientists are religious fanatics — it means that Rafael Cruz and his son are delusional.

Now, before considering whether the mainstream media is really left-wing, one should look at who owns the media. Consider this: In 1983, 90 percent of American media was owned by 50 companies, and by 2011, that number had fallen to six companies: CBS, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp, Disney and GE, which subsequently sold its media holding, NBC Universal, to cable giant Comcast (which would, in turn, later try to merge with Time Warner Cable, although that deal eventually fell apart).

Thus, the media at large has one crucial goal: to make a profit. Not to serve the public, but to make money by selling advertisement spots to other corporations, whether they are selling new cars or tech products or pointless new drugs. All of this profit-making hardly sounds like the socialist media that Republicans would have everyone believe.

One has to look no further than the coverage of Donald Trump to see this strategy in action. The Donald and the media have been feeding off of each other over the past few months. Trump loves the attention, and the media loves the “Yooge” ratings that he brings. (The higher the ratings, the more the network can charge for advertising or subscriptions.) CNN, for example, has covered Trump as if he were a natural disaster, and even bumped a 1oth anniversary special for Hurricane Katrina to cover one of Trump’s rambling campaign events.