'The Night the Media Took it on the Chin'

Clearly, the medium’s meltdown was the message of last night’s primaries, as Alvin Felzenberg, the spokesman for the 9/11 Commission writes in US News & World Report. It’s a look at what can happen when prefab spin built in the cocoon of the MSM meets reality:

This year’s August primary night will go down as the night the media took it on the chin. The returns from Arizona, Alaska, and Florida provide proof that the purveyors of wisdom, housed in studios in Washington, D.C. and New York, still don’t “get it.”

We begin in Arizona. The media spin regarding Ben Quayle’s congressional primary win is that his name recognition and fundraising capacity “did it for him.” I have yet to read or hear how the national media, through the free publicity it bestowed upon him as it sought to take him down, added to his celebrity status and helped stock his treasury. First came stories about his allegedly posting items on a “naughty” Web site and, as if this were Watergate, “lying about it.” In the hands of a national media, Ben was all but presented as one of the preeminent purveyors of pornography in America. To this day, more people have heard about this Web site than actually viewed it. And what constitutes the definition of the word “naughty” in the eyes of Ben’s accusers is anyone’s guess.

CNN clinched Ben’s nomination when it had John King devote 20 minutes to cross examining Ben, not about what his policy views, but about whether he stands by an opinion he offered in an ad that Barack Obama is the worst president in history. It obviously did not dawn upon producers that this is a view a good many Republican primary voters in Arizona share. To them, King presented Quayle as the most anti-Obama Republican in the field. If Ben’s campaign has a sense of humor, they would send CNN a dozen red roses.

In case you’ve missed it, it’s a quite a slab of read meat:

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No wonder the leftwing suits at CNN would have had a collective aneurysm upon viewing that, not to mention their long tradition of propping up even more autocratic and self-styled members of the Ruling Class wherever they find them.

And speaking of last night, John Podhoretz links to what he calls the “Brilliantly Ironic Blog Post of the Day,” from Yuval Levin in the Corner, on John McCain’s victory:

McCain (who has raised and spent more money than any Senate candidate in this cycle, other than self-financed candidates) must be glad that none of the smug busybodies who have tried through the years to restrict political expression by preventing candidates for public office from raising enormous amounts of money and spending them on attack ads has succeeded.

Heh.™