Daily Archives: April 6, 2005

CNN's Inside the (Liberal) Blogs

Most of you are probably aware that CNN has a regular segment covering what blogs are talking about. Ian at Jackson’s Junction has the latest segment. Out of the dozens of hot topics on the blogosphere, CNN focused exclusively on one – Tom DeLay’s (alleged) corruption. Ok fine, it would be hard to cover more than one topic on such a short segment. But then they proceeded to cover liberal blogs and the supporting NYT and WaPo hit pieces, only briefly mentioning a couple of conservative sites. I timed it for good measure. The “liberal side” got four times the coverage than conservative blogs. Not 40% more, but 400% more. It’s not as if conservative blogs aren’t covering this too.

Is this little hit piece a big deal? Not by itself no. But when the show makes a point of looking at political blogs from the left and right, and then focuses on the left by a 4 to 1 margin, its sort of telling no?

With Friends Like This

The MSM’s relationship to the Democrats reminds me of that bad kid I hung out with in school who kept egging me on to make the wrong choices: “hey man, everything’s ok, everybody’s doin it, its cool”. Things always felt so good and so right at the time, and hey, my buddy wouldn’t lead me astray. It was usually the next day or so when reality came crashing down on me.

While liberal bias in the media may be frustrating to us conservatives, at least we know it when we see it. Liberals want so bad to believe what they hear in the media that they take it as gospel. Just look where the liberals’ friends in the MSM have taken the Democrats in the last couple of years.

Buoyed by the MSM’s endless cycle of Iraqi quagmire stories and self fulfilling polls the Dems took a cut and run position. Countless success stories abounded in the alternate media as well as legitimate polls which predicted that Iraqis were ready for democracy, but the Dems couldn’t or wouldn’t see reality. Instead they chose the MSM version and ended up on the wrong side of history when Iraqis overwhelmingly embraced democracy.

Before that, the MSM lead the Dems down the garden path of embracing the U.N. as the answer to all of our international problems. Again the blogosphere was abuzz with stories of U.N. corruption long before the Oil For Food scandal became too big to be avoided by the mainstream press. How ridiculous does Kerry’s “international test” look now?

More recently the MSM has spun the Schiavo story as a Republican albatross, but again, the facts were largely ignored, bogus memos were relied on, and the polls were spun to reify the story, not to ascertain true public sentiment. Zogby had the kahunas to conduct a fair poll and, sure enough, most would have favored keeping Terri Schiavo alive.

Finally, take a look at the public sentiment on the issue of same sex marriage referred to by Jayson at PoliPundit. Judging from press accounts in the MSM over the last year or so, one would have thought that Republicans were radical religious freaks based on their position on this issue. Not so at all. But the Dems took it hook, line and sinker.

With friends like the MSM…

That Fake Talking Points Memo

Both Ankle Biting Pundits and Powerline have the latest on the memo scandal reported by the Washington Times. Apparently not a single Republican knew anything about the source of the talking points memo. In fact, all of the Senators were interviewed with no results. All but two that is. Democrat Senators Jack Reed and Harry Reid refused to respond. That’s funny, isn’t Harry Reid the one who’s been claiming Republican foul play the loudest.

Just think of all of the facts that have surfaced since the original story was reported. How hard was it to get these facts? Most of them just came from a common sense review of the document itself. Let’s say that review took a couple of hours to digest and think about. Probably less, but lets err on the side of caution. Then there was the exercise that the Times did of interviewing the Senators. Ok that takes a bit more time, probably a couple of days to track everybody down and get ahold of them. Not a lot of effort I’d say.

Now imagine if those facts were (ok hold your hats here, I’m going to suggest something that sounds a little nuts) actually reported. It seems pretty obvious that the story would infer the opposite of what the original story did. But I guess that’s the point isn’t it. Fact checking and journalistic integrity wouldn’t give them the story they wanted to tell. So instead they excitedly rushed out with the baloney memo story.

The Times and blogs report (the others stonewall), you decide.

mm-5