Stephen Kruiser asks the 143 million dollar question: “Is It Really Bias If Most Of The MSM Is This Stupid?”
While the press was out digging up the shocking fact that [Rep. Joe] Wilson has taken No-Doz in the past, “crazy” bloggers were uncovering an actual loon in the House of Czars. 9/11 Truthers are so universally deemed insane that it’s the one issue that conservatives and Bill Maher agree on. That one of them had his hands on $80 billion of stimulus cash seemed like a story to many.
Not NBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd. To be fair, reporting on anything negative in the Obama White House is grounds for immediate dismissal at NBC.
On to the ACORN story. The president’s pet group of community organizers (”Just like Jesus!”) has been getting into some trouble recently. Nothing as egregious as Joe Wilson’s shouting, of course, just pondering some teenage prostitution and stuff. Knowing that this is probably merely the tip of the sleaze iceberg, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to cut off federal bucks for ACORN yesterday. I found out about it while being online for ninety seconds to check my email last night. ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson cackled proudly about his ignorance of the story this morning.
Perhaps Charlie was busy perching his glasses on the end of his nose for an interview with Mark Levin, whose book Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto has dominated the New York Times best seller list this year (1 million copies sold as of today).
Or not. If you need to reach Mark, rest assured that he’s not on the phone with any of the network morning show bookers. However, if you’re dying to know what Elizabeth Edwards is up to she’ll be back on in an hour to pimp her book again. When books like Levin’s and Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption shoot to the top of the NYT best seller list, the MSM employs a “if we ignore them they might go away” strategy. Good luck with that.
Politico.com has become one of the more respected online sources for political news and it has been acquiring some of the MSM’s lazy and irresponsible habits lately. Today alone we have even more hard-hitting news about-three guesses-Joe Wilson from Ben Smith. There is also an article from Chris Frates that is actually fair to us on the right. However, the YouTube evidence cited in the piece has been floating around the right wing blogosphere for weeks now. While it is a step in the right (no pun intended) direction, it’s a very slow, painful step.
The MSM routinely gets shown up by bloggers now. Rather than respond with some responsible journalism, they spend time denigrating those who do their jobs for them. Any time a guy from the New York Times whines about a lack of judgment and honesty in others you know the oxygen content in the room is a little thin.
There have, of course, been other industries that haven’t been able to see their doom staring at them from the mirror before. We’ve never had the convenience of one of them doing it so publicly until now, however. The very nature of journalism prevents these people from having their credibility disintegrate quietly.
The public nature of the demise of the MSM will make it easy for them to go back and see exactly how they destroyed themselves.
After the crazy bloggers teach them how to use Google and YouTube, of course.
More on Charlie Gibson from Ed Morrissey:
A couple of points should be made. First, Gibson is not the entirety of ABC News. As [Don Wade and Roma at Chicago’s WLS-AM who forced Gibson’s confession of ignorance on the story] point out, ABC has been reporting it through Jake Tapper, although currently only on the website.
All that being said, the ACORN story is not just a Kanye West celebrity dust-up. It involves tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and potentially billions in upcoming legislation. ACORN has worked tirelessly on behalf of the Democratic Party in the last election cycle and beyond, helping to organize in communities on behalf of Obama’s domestic policy agenda. It’s a story worthy of national coverage, and leaving it to the cable news outlets may explain why people don’t bother to tune into the broadcast networks any longer to get informed.
Let’s pose the question this way. If the Federalist Society, which got a heaping helping of demonization during the John Roberts and Samuel Alito confirmation hearings, started giving advice to prospective pimps and hookers on tax evasion and hiding child-prostitution rings, does anyone think that the Charlie Gibsons and the Papers of Record in the US would let that slide to the cable networks? Or would it headline their outlets, complete with a dissection of Federalist Society support for Republicans?
As Glenn Reynolds like to say, none of this “fits the narrative.” But we’ve just spent the year witnessing how minimal the narrative was to begin with. On Twitter, Bernard Goldberg adds, “Charlie Gibson admits he knows NOTHING about the ACORN tapes. There is NO hope. NONE. They live in a bubble and are clueless. RIP MSM.”
But who will be the first would-be emperor to admit the gatekeepers have no clothes?
Update: I don’t know which is the scarier analogy: my headline above, or Dan Riehl’s suggestion that Charlie Gibson is “Dan Rather wearing Mary Mapes’ panties.”
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