Last year blogger 24thstate did some excellent reporting about the structure of a little-known blog heavily linked to the Democratically dynastic Carnahan family of Missouri. The blog is a clearinghouse of all things anti-anti-Carnahan, with special attention on Roy Blunt (challenger to daughter Robin Carnahan, most recently of voter fraud fame) and Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, whose health care lawsuit appeals too much to all the independents and Democrats who overwhelmingly voted for Prop C, a.k.a. the Health Care Freedom Act during the primaries.
One of the things I’ve noticed about the left is their inability to recognize balanced journalism and mistake (a term I’m not sure of as it implies innocent motive) objectivity for bias. As was clearly proven with study after study on leftist media bias (hence the public’s distrust of media), they’ve benefitted greatly from the uneven playing field for some time. However, facing fewer subscriptions, ratings drops, et al., media is catching on: people don’t want endless editorializing. They want the facts, Jack. If you’re going to be op/ed, at least be up front about it.
Having enjoyed media preference for so long, the folks at the Carnahan-linked blog were shocked and dismayed when they discovered that the honeymoon may be over.
The site published a post critical of the way in which extreme bias was edited from a piece authored by Tony Messenger:
It’s easy to see why Nixon wouldn’t want to keep Kinder in the loop. The lieutenant governor’s Twitter feed is filled with the most far-right Republican conspiracy theories of the day. Kinder has compared liberals to Hitler, politicized a hostage crisis and repeated false claims about “death panels” in the new federal health care law. He even speculated on the worst “tramp stamp” tattoos on women.
It’s tough to take Kinder seriously when his daily communication with the public is either purely politically motivated or just plain unprofessional.
The above was apparently the original wording. The italicized portions are my emphasis of Messenger’s editorializing. What’s with these reporters? They think their byline is more important than the fact of the story they’re supposed to report. No one cares what Messenger or any other journalist thinks, they want the story. Period. MSM’s inability to give the people what they want has resulted in both citizen journalism (people creating a product they’re unable to find elsewhere) and drop in support for media overall.
Kinder didn’t compare liberals to Hitler. He stated:
Right, because liberals have never been supportive of Mao or Pol Pot. We can forgive the blog for being unaware of history.
Kinder didn’t have to politicize the ecoterrorist at the Discovery building because it was ALREADY politicized in motive:
He said he was inspired by ‘Ishmael’, a novel by environmentalist Daniel Quinn and by former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.
So is Messenger upset that Kinder acknowledged James Jay Lee’s political ideology? Each example given is exactly the same as above in that the discrepancy isn’t factual, it’s political.
The blog takes issue with the rewording in the print version, which ended up looking like this:
And it’s easy to see why Nixon might not want to keep Kinder in the loop. Since Nixon became governor, Kinder has used his office to challenge Nixon — from a battle of the Tour of Missouri bike race to questions about tax credits to criticism of the governor’s commitment to the St. Louis region.
Horrors! You mean that the editor in charge substituted precise, actual issues for rhetorical gobbledygook? Like, someone in the upper echelon over there did their job? Good job, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The blog’s main criticism, in summation:
Why is the mainstream Missouri media so reluctant to to [sic] report the facts about Kinder’s dishonest, extreme, bizarre and immature Twitter messages? He’s a statewide elected official broadcasting offensive, false and absurd garbage in a public forum — this can and should be reported to the news-consuming public.
Once again, let us run this graph through the Big Journalism Rhetorimeter , a “machine invented by Retracto to aid in stripping useless partisan rhetoric from statements so the public can discover the truth:”
Why is the mainstream Missouri media so reluctant to report what we consider as facts, or carry our water? We want the media to bully individuals with whom we disagree using the false premise of “caring” for the news-consuming public.
Right, because it’s not bizarre at all to have a senate candidate whose government office is so bizarrely linked to a blog where authors hide behind anonymous names to carry out smear campaigns against public officials. Now that may be newsworthy.