Times Watch reads Frank Rich so you don’t have to, and catches him repeating the canard that Rep. John Lews (D-GA) was “pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters” on the Sunday that ObamaCare was rammed through Congress:
“Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes. Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod’s father was murdered 200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis with lying — never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses — and tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn’t push it.”
Frank must be exceptionally well-paid as a Timesman, because there’s $100,000 on the table to verify this claim. Otherwise, one might say Rich is being…Stalinist, to coin a phrase.
Also in that same Times Watch post are these quotes:
“But it is an open question whether conservative media outlets risk damage to their credibility when obscure or misleading stories are blown out of proportion and when what amounts to political opposition research is presented as news.” — Media reporter Brian Stelter on the Andrew Breitbart-Shirley Sherrod tape controversy, July 26.
Leave That Sort of Thing to Us, Part II
“But what is emerging is more of a permanent crusade, where information is not only power, but a means to a specific end. As content providers increasingly hack their own route to an audience, it’s becoming clear that many are less interested in covering the game than tilting the field.” — Media columnist David Carr on the Andrew Breitbart-Shirley Sherrod tape controversy, July 26.
Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper with ties to the JournoList that blew the obscure and misleading story of the Augusta National Golf Course out of proportion (95 stories on the topic from late 2002 to mid-2003), rather than focus on the intense early days of the aftermath of 9/11, and then went on a seemingly permanent crusade against Abu Ghraib, running a month’s worth of consecutive cover stories on the topic in June of the election year of 2004?
Of course it is.
Related Video: From Saturday, “Breitbart at Uni-Tea Philadelphia: Lambastes Media For Ignoring Truth Behind ‘N Word’ Story.”
Watch the whole thing, but here’s the key clip:
[youtube GRHfxEe-9YE]
Update: Welcome InstaReaders — and as the Professor is wont to say, heh, indeed.
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