Saturday, October 23, 2004

Media Types Getting Uppity?

As Jon Stewart says tonight on C-SPAN, the media's not liberal; it's lazy. Satisfied with scream-fests between political slap-stick clowns mouthing "talking points," the cable media (at least) has been a long time away from asking and answering the simplest of questions: who's telling the truth and who isn't?

There is apparently, however, a recent increased level of fact-checking among isolated pockets of the media of what Bush/Cheney, particularly, have been saying ... if we're to believe a piece in The New Republic (excerpted in the Columbia Journalism Review's blog "Campaign Desk").

The heightened level of Rovian "push-back" against any media types who dare to raise a glass to truth ... was news to me, the best proof that there may actually be a stirring of wakefulness among the Fourth Estate:

"On October 6, the RNC put 'Hardball' host Chris Matthews, a former staffer for House Speaker Tip O'Neill, in its sights. 'Democrat Chris Matthews's Selective "Analysis," ' read the headline on a three-page press release that accused Matthews of erroneously claiming Cheney had contradicted himself during the debate when he denied tying September 11 to Saddam Hussein. Accompanying the release, the RNC posted online a video attacking Matthews. A few days later, Republicans took issue with The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller's accurate statement that, despite Bush's claims, Kerry 'essentially voted for one large tax increase, the Clinton tax bill of 1993.' 'The New York Times Shades the Truth,' read the headline of a press release the RNC quickly put out. Next up was Ron Suskind, who wrote a critical piece in The New York Times Magazine. 'Liberal Democrat Suskind has creativity but not facts,' the RNC declared. A few days later, [Times op-ed page columnist] Paul Krugman became the RNC's target. In Suskind's and Krugman's cases, the oppo was unusually personal and included unflattering pictures of the men, the kind that candidates dig up of their opponents, not of journalists."

When truth itself is under assault, democracy is under assault. And if they're willing to take down the disenfranchised seeking to vote for a change in Ohio, they'll take down Chris Matthews. (And welcome to him.)

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