In case you ever thought the media played things straight — you know, actually quoted people accurately and, when paraphrasing, gave a fair summation of what the person actually said and meant — think again.

Check out this priceless clip from the increasingly irrelevant Morning Joe MSNBC gabfest, which features a sputtering Chris Matthews summarizing some remarks from Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, who’s running against Harry Reid in Nevada for the U.S. Senate.

Like a typical leftist, poor Chris has no sense of irony or metaphor or anything else — spooked by his own dark fantasies of the right, he takes every statement made by a conservative absolutely literally, then spins it into a terrifying tale of lurking militias and Christian-rightists and lions and tigers and bears oh my… (more…)

This piece, in the Times of London, is worth reading for many reasons, but most of all to show how far journalism — we used to call it “reporting” — has strayed from its mid-century ideal. To wit:

Nicholas Tomalin — the wonderful, bombastic Sunday Times writer who died in 1973 reporting from the Golan Heights — thought he knew the answer. In 1969, a happier time for the industry, he began a piece in this magazine by asserting: “The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” But if Tomalin were commissioned now, he would strike out that famous gambit and start again.

Jon Meacham

Today, you’ll need luck, flair, an alternative source of income, endless patience, an optimistic disposition, sharp elbows and a place to stay in London. But the essential quality for success now is surely tenacity. Look around the thinning newsrooms of the national titles. Look at the number of applicants for journalism courses, at the queue of graduates — qualified in everything except the only thing that matters, experience — who are desperate for unpaid work on newspapers and magazines. Look at the 1,200 people who applied in September for one reporter’s position on the new Sunday Times website. You’d shoot a horse with those odds.

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Readers rarely get a chance to see the re-writing of history, but they’re seeing an attempt in the recent reporting by the Legacy Media of the John Edwards Scandal.

Several recently-published books (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change and Edwards’ ex-aide, Andrew Young’s The Politician) examine the John Edwards scandal and Edwards’ elaborate cover-up of his affair and love child with campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.

Halperin and Heilemann would have readers believe that they were on the trail of the story from the start–and perhaps they were.  It’s just that they didn’t bother to inform the readers of their employers, TIME and New York, while the scandal and cover-up were occurring.

Both books have prompted reports and discussions of the Edwards Scandal, particularly on ABC, which scored a series of exclusive interviews of Young, intent on publicizing his book.  The interviews along with other information is featured prominently on ABC’s website under John Edwards Scandal: (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)

For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)

While the media is dragging out the insensitive, possibly racist comments of Harry Reid and Bill Clinton, let me throw a few hypotheticals out there because a journalistic ethical line may have been crossed, and was done so with biased intent by New York Magazine’s John Heilemann and Time magazine’s Mark Halperin.

A pre-arranged agreement probably took place here between the reporters and interviewees, but we all know what contracts and pre-nuptial agreements are worth nowadays.

Hypothetical #1
Harry Reid made his

“light-skinned”, “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”

comments during the 2008 presidential primaries.

Had the reporters (and I use that title intentionally) reported what they heard, that may or may not have had an effect on the outcome. Some voters might have been so disgusted with Reid, they may have taken it out on Obama’s opponents at the time, or stayed home altogether. (more…)

Why did Game Change authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann keep quiet on one of the 2008 campaign’s juiciest stories–only to spill the beans eighteen months later?

More importantly, why did they tell their readers about the John Edwards scandal only after it became personally profitable to do so?

Political reporters Halperin and Heilemann signed their book deal in June 2008, reportedly for a “mid- to high- six-figure sum.”co-authors of the ubiquitous political tell-all, Game Change.  Sprinkled amongst this cornucopia of unsourced gossip, rumor, whispers and innuendo are nuggets of hard news, particularly about former 2008 Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards.

Of particular interest was the following passage, from the excerpt published by Heilemann’s employer, New York :

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When the news broke yesterday that Sarah Palin had signed on as a Fox News contributor an awful shrinking feeling in the groin must have hit the execs at the network’s competitors. While the old media continues to try to paint her as a crazed redneck, the fact of her ascendancy as a serious power player is now an inescapable fact. Her autobiography, Going Rogue is a publishing phenomenon, having sold 2.7 million copies as of December 1 of 2009.  It’s one of  just four political memoirs to sell more than a million copies.

This from — as the left frames the narrative — a failed vice-presidential candidate who didn’t even finish her first term in office as governor of Alaska.  The old media and its enablers have tried in vain to discredit, demonize and disenfranchise the woman only to make her stronger. Yet still they hammer away at her relentlessly.

In the new book that has evey tongue in Washington wagging, Game Change, by political writers John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, it’s claimed that some McCain staffers who worked directly with Palin began to worry that she could be “mentally unstable.” This claim has been trumpeted by left-wing bloggers and the usual suspects in the press, desperate to keep up the Palin-bashing so they can ignore Obama’s increasingly evident failures. (more…)

The president of the United States is a “light-skinned” man “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”  That, at least, is the carefully considered opinion of soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, quoted in a forthcoming book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change, about the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  The thing is, Hapless Harry meant it in a good way.

At least he did until now, when the news of the explosive statement found its way into The Washington Post and Politico.  Already reeling in his hopeless, doomed-as-Chris-Dodd campaign for re-election this fall, the Sage of Searchlight no doubt thought he was being complimentary in his usual clueless, white-guy-of-a-certain-age way.  After all, when Harry was growing up, “Negro” was the polite term you used to show you weren’t a racist, and as for light-skinned, well, we all knew what that meant.  Why, the next thing you know, Unhorsed Harry will be describing Obama as “a credit to his race.”

The authors write: “Reid was convinced, in fact, in fact,that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”  Gee, that sounds a lot like what Geraldine Ferraro said, and her reward was practically being drummed out of the Democrat Party.

This isn’t the first time the scrappy little Mormon boxer has found himself on his keister over race.  He had some ‘splainin’ to do when the seat-warming, monument-building senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, explicitly charged him with racism for trying to block indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich from appointing an African-American to replace Obama in the senate.  Watch and listen to Harry dance as David Gregory grills him on Meet the Press:

But there’s bigger game afoot than one pathetic little man’s attempt to cling to his rapidly diminishing power.  With Dodd and Byron Dorgan having defenestrated themselves, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, two of the nastier people in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, are busily greasing the skids for obvious Democrat losers like Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and other endangered-species types. (more…)