Alchemy: CBS's Nancy Cordes Converts Daily Kos Blogposts into Nightly News Broadcasts

Old and Busted: Bloggers? Those are nothing but partisan guys in their pajamas, looking to shoot down that paragon of objectivity, CBS’s Dan Rather, as former CBS producer Jonathan Klein said in 2004 as Rather’s self-induced auto-de-fé was nearing its apogee.

The New Hotness: Ten years after Rathergate, they’re a rich source of partisan raw material for the CBS Evening News:

Here is how she “reported” this last night, on CBSNews’ evening broadcast:

CORDES: But Boehner’s own attempts to craft immigration legislation has been blocked by members of his own party who worry reform would give new rights to people who came here illegally and Tuesday’s election added more members on his far right flank, North Carolina’s Mark Walker has suggested blitzing the border with fighter jets. Virginia’s Barbara Comstock said undocumented immigrants should be tracked like FedEx packages.

I very much doubted that Barbara Comstock had said that. I also doubted she could be fairly characterized as “far right,” as she was dogged as a RINO throughout the primary and then into the general election.

Turns out she didn’t say that. What she said was that FedEx can track packages throughout the country, so we can track immigrants who are here as well. She did not say we should “track them like FedEx packages.”

Here’s the quote in context.

So where did CBS “reporter” Nancy Cordes get this idea that the “far right” RINO Barbara Comstock said we should track immigrants “like FedEx packages”?

Well, Google “comstock immigrants fedex.”

You’ll see where Nancy Cordes got it — she got it from far left blog Think Progress:

Headline: Republican Congressional Candidate: Government Should Track Immigrants Like FedEx Tracks Packages

From far left blog The Daily Kos:

Headline: Barbara Comstock demands we track immigrants like FedEx tracks packages

Given the sclerotic age of dwindling TV news viewers, CBS’s news division at this point is basically is a public service repeating the news, Chevy Chase and Garrett Morris style, to elderly viewers who can’t understand how that newfangled Interwebs thing their grandkids keep talking about actually works, along with plenty of leftwing partisanship along the way. I wonder what they’d think if they knew how the sausage was made, or where the raw materials come from. (Or how closely they’re tied to the Obama administration?)  Or to put it another way:

Enough. If Cordes wants to sound like a blogger from Daily Kos, she should go to the Daily Kos. But CBS should think long and hard about having a newsroom built around actual news reporting and known less for being the longtime home of Dan Rather, who was involved in manufacturing stories against a Republican president, and for hostility to reporters who investigate Democrats as well as Republicans, such as Sharyl Attkisson.

As the Insta-professor likes to say, just think of the MSM as Democrat operatives with bylines, and you won’t go far wrong. Nice of CBS’s Nancy Cordes to illustrate just how that works.