Well, not always (see Crooks and Liars post here). It could all just be a joke from C&L’s point-of-view and maybe I’m overreacting. But there are instances that I’ve posted about previously (see the end of this post) where C&L committed a similar misrepresentation and those, most certainly, were not jokes.
I feel bad picking on C&L here without making it clear that this is not something I feel is exclusive to C&L or liberal blogs. This is rampant in all media and, to me, merely denigrates the platform. I know many bloggers like myself have a on-and-off-again relationship with ‘journalism’. We think we are journalists and that allows us to feel our opinions are worth publication, but at the same time, we’re merely bloggers so it’s practically expected for us to get things wrong or flat out shill for a favoured political party.
Well, that C&L post form Nicole Belle could likely be placed in the “shilling” category.
The clip in the C&L post (and the accurate transcription) suggests that John McCain believes Venezuela is a country in the Mideast. Certainly an embarrassing revelation, if true. And quite impossible to believe, even if Senator McCain is among the worst geography students in the Senate. Huge Chavez is no shrinking violet, and his name certainly doesn’t ring out as a ‘Mideastern’ name. What’s much more likely is that McCain was referring to “other parts of the Middle East” that had not been discussed yet (perhaps the earlier talk was about Iraq and Saudi Arabia? I could not find a longer clip) or that he simply said ‘other’ when he shouldn’t have. Somehow that’s worth a post on a site that gets thousands of readers a day. Nicole Belle’s assertion is, at best, akin to claiming your friend doesn’t know the difference between right and left because she gave you the wrong direction’s to her house.
We bloggers always bitch about how the Mainstream Media (MSM, as we bloggers like to call it) spends inordinate time on the most trivial bullshit (Britney Spears’ vagina, Anna Nicole-Smith’s vagina, other famous vaginas) and yet here we are calling our current least-favorite politician’s minor slip of the tongue proof positive that he is a fool.
How does creating ridiculous controversies as part of political coverage help inform voters and fill the hole that our ADD mainstream media has left behind? To act like this McCain’s out-of-context quote or slip-up is at all relevant to the coming elections is absurd.
On the other hand, a post at C&L about Sarah Palin’s reading habits does seem relevant to me (longer post with context at youtube, starting around the 3:00 mark). Palin’s evasiveness about such a simple question as what newspapers and magazines she reads suggests a degree of shame about either (a) what she reads; or (b) what she doesn’t read. Was she afraid if she said The New Yorker, she’d lose her small-town-girl credentials? Or does she really… not read? Let’s not kid ourselves: There is no better source of knowledge, in terms of depth and density, than the written word. If she does not read, than we really are looking at someone with a profound lack of curiousity (remind you of any Presidents?) and if that does not suggest an ignorant person, it certainly suggests an easily fooled person at the minimum.
(And pity poor Katie Couric. You could see it on her face when she received Palin’s non-answer that she was on the verge of showing ‘bias’… because it would be biased to tell somone to stop evading a simple question and just answer it or explain why you refuse to answer it)
I’ve responded to a couple of attacks on McCain that I felt were unfair in the past (a post from the end of August where a C&L blogger attributed a closeness to John McCain’s dealings with the financial industry, despite that the money shows Obama is in the lead receiving Wall Street money, and a post from two weeks ago about what I thought was a near-indefensible accusation of racism from John McCain’s campaign where none existed and the real insinuation of the ad could not be more clear).
… and the cow goes moo
