The same WaPo that crowd-sourced Sarah Palin’s emails; the same race-baiting WaPo that made a front page story out of a 30 year-old rock; the same WaPo that ignored the Jeremiah Wright story (h/t: Jim Geraghty) –  has now launched a partisan attack against Senator Marco Rubio, a man widely believed to be a leading contender for the Republican Vice Presidential nod in 2012.

One-by-one the MSM is attempting to pick our candidates off with lies, half-truths, innuendo, and phony narratives — especially our non-white, non-male candidates who represent a unique threat to the re-election of Barack Obama and the Democrat party in general. Yesterday, the Washington Post launched the latest narrative missile in this ongoing media campaign, but thankfully the Miami Herald has already fired back (as has Rubio):

Did the Washington Post embellish Marco Rubio’s ‘embellishments’?

The Washington Post just released this interesting story headlined “Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show.” The paper flagged a clear inaccuracy in his official Senate biography that states the Senator’s parents “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”

That’s false. Rubio’s parents came to the US before then, in 1956. They remained in the US after Castro took over in 1959. They returned to Cuba for brief stints early on, before the country devolved into Soviet-style totalitarianism.

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In some Tweets I sent to Jim Geraghty at NRO yesterday, I was pointing out that I thought he was allowing his expectations to get in the way of his reporting on Sarah Palin’s bus tour. Unfortunately, perhaps he was too busy to respond. But while ribbing him some, I was attempting to make a point.

I re-Tweeted him, initially and laughed.

lol @jimgeraghty: Sarah Palin’s bus destinations: information is need-to-know, & the MSM doesn’t need 2 know.

How can one read the above and not be reminded of Reagan’s practice of going over the media’s head, directly to the people? That holds true even if some media outlets might promote, or fancy, themselves to be of Reagan in some sense, as still others might think they actually are not quite that?

@jimgeraghty Kinda funny, Jim – Bcuz it isn’t what you think it shld be, it must be wrong, or odd, somehow. I think if she wnted 2 do wht you think she should, she wld have asked. ; ) Oh well,

What if its mostly about filming location shots, too large a crowd might be bad for that? Try putting dwn Ur assumptions for it then you could, you know, just report whatever it is, or isnt. w/o judging everything so much.

I’ve no desire to single out Jim for criticism here, media over all – and especially DC-based media, is increasingly long on opinion, while short on facts. To some extent, we are seeing that reflected in the broader media coverage of Palin’s bus trip. Here is Jim’s piece: (more…)

The mainstream media’s headlong and heady descent into denigrating George W. Bush over the last decade signaled a dark moment in media history that has surely damaged American consciousness. Caught up in “Bush-bashing,” the MSM reached a critical turning point, and likely one of no return.

At times consciously and even triumphally, the media increasingly abused the traditional journalistic standards of independence and neutrality in favor of functioning as a virtual arm of the liberal Democratic Party. They took on, in effect, a new and disturbing identity.

So consumed by politics, power and status did the MSM become during this period that bashing the former president became standard media fare. This death by a thousand cuts proceeded unabashedly, unabatedly, and largely without challenge by Bush and his staff during his presidencies.

Jim A. Kuypers concluded as much in his study, Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age, in which he meticulously documents how the agenda-driven and “anti-democratic” media not long after the 9/11 terror attacks began pervasively distorting the former president’s statements, failing to report critical parts of his speeches, and even “framing” (manipulating stories) to portray the president as an enemy.

Among countless examples: (more…)