Need some LTTE help regarding that Librul Media

[NewJeffCT]

I would like to compose a reply to this liberal media rant below. Can anybody help me compose something in response? I would like to start about him drinking that Liberal Media Kool Aid. (There goes a conservative again, drinking that liberal media Kool Aid whenever somebody dares report something that does not toe the Karl Rove approved line about one of their icons...)

A while back, Al Franken had mentioned something about Rush Limbaugh citing fair.org and saying that fair.org said that he had had only a very small amount of inaccurate statements over 10 or 12 years ¨C it might have been 12 misstatements in 10 years or 10 in 12 years. However, Franken said that if you actually went out to fair.org¡¯s website, Limbaugh had like 10,000 misstatements in one year alone. Is my memory correct on this?

If I am also not mistaken, fair.org had also come out and said that 75% of the guests on the network and cable news TV shows were identifiable as Republican and/or conservative, leaving the remaining 25% as liberals, Democrats or other.

Any facts I can use would be of help.

Thanks


Here is the original letter:

CBS News has been rightfully challenged for its false report about President Bush's military record. Although it's good to see that someone was held accountable, this episode was not the result of an honest mistake or "investigative" journalism. It was an outright attempt to influence the presidential election.

CBS is far from alone. The major media spent the last four years trying to defeat Bush. They've tried to smear his reputation. They've misrepresented the facts and failed to report all sides of the issues in the campaign.

I'm sure those who read The Courant and other major newspapers and news magazines and who watch network news know all about the alleged benefits of gay marriage; but have they heard about the dangers? I'm sure readers and news watchers know all about the alleged benefits of embryonic stem cell research, but have they heard about its failures? They do if they listen to conservative talk radio or visit conservative websites.

When the Founding Fathers introduced the concept of a free press, they assumed that along with freedom comes responsibility. They were concerned about government censorship. But they didn't think about media censorship.

While the mainstream media continue to lose readership and viewership, conservative talk radio and the Internet continue to grow. They will grow as sources of information as long as the mainstream media continue to push their own agenda, instead of providing consumers with information.

David R. Lyon

Willimantic
The writer works in the advertising department of the Willimantic Chronicle. He was a write-in candidate for the 2nd Congressional District seat in 2004.

http://www.ctnow.com/news/opinion/letters/hc-letsbox0113jan13,1,1238513.story?coll=hc-headlines-letters

[shoelace414]

1. how about talking about

percentge of peolple that believe things that are just plain wrong, but is the President 10K administration line.

[AP]

2. Greg Pallast has an interesting comment about this.

Check his website and see if you don't want to condense Pallast's points down to two paragraphs, eg:

(1) who were these people making a decision about journalistic ethics at CBS? Two republicans with bad ethics of their own, and

(2) Where's the proportionality? Compare some of the other lies the media has been reporting without fact checking.

[central scrutinizer]

3. Get books by Joe Conason and Eric Alterman

Both have recent books out debunking the liberal media myth, with lots of documentation.

[NewJeffCT]

4. I'd love to get the books

But, by the time I get through reading them, I'd be responding to this letter in 2006!

[zbdent]

5. Throw in the "I never said that!" reference in the third debate

In 2000, Al Gore appeared all splotchy in the first debate. You were unable to go near a cable news station without seeing it.

In the third debate, Bush called John Kerry a liar (in so many words): When John Kerry (CORRECTLY) stated that Bush said he wasn't concerned about Osama bin Laden, Bush said "I never said that!". Trouble was, on 3/13/2002, HE DID. And it was on the White House web site, a "liberal" bastion of lies. And this was one of the handful of press conferences that Bush actually answered questions from the press. So you know that the "liberal media" wouldn't have to dig through a ton of tapes to find it. Yet we never got the constant bombardment of the clip, unlike every time you turned around on Leno - "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" of Bill Clinton.

Could that be of some use?

[NewJeffCT]

6. good one

I used that in my final paragraph - which lie was more important in the grand scheme of things and which got more coverage "I did not have sex with that woman" or "I never said that" in response to his statement about not being concerned about Osama bin Laden.

[gratuitous]

7. A quantitavie comparison

Courtesy of The Poor Man:

http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003654.html

[NewJeffCT]

9. good one, but

I'd rather compare Rathergate to the daily shenanigans of Fox, CNN, MSNBC and RW Hate Radio ...

[Dr Fate]

8. "Why was no one fired over FAKE Swift Boat info as well?"

???

[JHB]

10. Some places to check out on this topic

http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003654.html
Rathergate Saddam's WMD
Investigation recently concluded? Yes Yes
Use of highly questionable supporting documents? Yes Yes
Central claims disproven? No Yes
Media spread questionable information? Yes Yes
Number of firings resulting from investigation 4 0
Number of high-profile reassignments resulting from investigation 1 0
Number of wars started using flawed justification 0 1


http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/2005/01/how-rules-change.html
Amazingly, the CBS team reporting on the president’s lost year in the National Guard—and do let’s recall that the suspect memos made a neat fit with other signs that Bush took a powder—never talked to the purported source of the documents even after Burkett changed his story about who it was.

That’s incredible.

Or would be, that is, had Conason and I not documented even worse transgressions in our book, "The Hunting of the President."

During the infamous Whitewater scandals, reporters pursuing Clinton credited the "revelations" of paid sources; edited audio tapes and video clips to make innocent remarks appear suspect; routinely hid exculpatory evidence (my favorite was a Washington Postarticle neglecting to mention that Clinton never endorsed a supposedly suspicious check); intervened with the Justice Department on behalf of an embezzler under indictment; actively assisted prosecutors trying to flip witnesses against the president; hyped stories about nonexistent FBI testimony alleging that the Clintons got $50,000 from a crooked loan; and even gathered information from sources and turned it over to Starr’s prosecutors.


http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan05.htm#111945
The main "evidence" the righties have for the presumed "political bias" of 60 Minutes in producing the segment is that they clearly wanted to get the story on the air in a hurry, presumably before the election.
But there are two wrong assumptions in that formulation, one of which is that a news team would not prefer to get material about one of two major candidates in a race on the air while it was timely. It doesn't matter who you support in a case like this; if you have the truth about the candidates, you put it before the public.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/10/183312/357
Okay, since I'm mentioned three times in the report (twice, inaccurately labelled a blogger), and I even played a peripheral role in the verification of the Killian memos, I guess I can call myself an "insider" to some small degree.
(I'm Paul Lukasiak, and my website is called The AWOL Project. Its at http://www.glcq.com. As the report correctly notes, when CBS wanted to find more Killian signatures in the publicly released documents, they came to me---and although I didn't know why I was being asked at the time, I was asked a number of questions pertaining to the consistency of the memos with the rest of the documents.)

And from the facts of which I'm aware, the Memogate Report can be described in one word.

Bullshit.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/12/132214/106
This Associated Press story also highlights the White House's shifting explanations (er, lies) trying to explain Bush's refusal to meet his obligations.
Note, none of this information depends on the CBS memos, but the Right successfully used questions about those memos to obscure the real issue, and that issue -- that Bush was AWOL for large periods of time and failed to fulfill his duty -- remained salient.

[NewJeffCT]

11. Thanks JHB

Some great stuff.