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by digby
The Edwards campaign is standing by their bloggers as they came under assault by the rightwing noise machine and good for them.
But this is going to be the pattern unless the news media recognises that they have a substantial number of readers who will not tolerate a reprise of the kind of rightwing smear job collusion we’ve seen in the past. No matter how tittilating the story, when a conservative hitman like William Donohue comes calling with a sob story about how “offended” he is by someone’s “vulgar” language, professional journalists should put his phony complaints into context. There’s no excuse for this failure to expose the agenda of the rightwing noise machine anymore. With lexis-nexis and Mr Google, it’s just too easy to research the accuser and put his comments into context before they breathlessly rush to report the latest little GOP oppo nugget of misinformation. In many cases, if they do this, they will see that the story is not newsworthy in the first place and if it is, it is much more complicated (and interesting!) than the faux outrage.
When a reporter gets information from a partisan source, they have an obligation to thoroughly vet that information and ensure that their outlet is not being used as a political tool — and if they are, and the story is newsworthy, they owe it to the reader to present both sides of the story. This is not “he said/she said,” as some commenters have assumed. (That is an entirely differEnt phenomenon, which is giving the impression that one opinion or conclusion is equal to another as a way to appear non-partisan.)
If an accuser or the beneficiary of a political hit is guilty of the thing of which they are accusing others, the press has an obligation to point that out. The readers have a right to know the full set of facts.
Tim Russert has been squirming on the witness stand for two days, attempting to explain his lazy and self-serving journalistic ethics. The most important fact to emerge is that he very rarely seemed to consider telling the public the whole set of facts on anything, preferring instead to dole out little bits as needed in order to keep his access and ensure that he didn’t upset the social rules of washington DC. The end result is that he told the wrong story.
Today we see the press running with another manufactured scandal about Pelosi’s airplane travel with all the glee of a bunch of 7th grade schoolkids on their way to the beach.
Enough is enough. Blogpac has put together a campaign to hit the news organizations that ran with the blogger story yesterday without providing any context on Donohue or the McCain staff. It’s great that Edwards didn’t cave on the issue, but this will not be the last of it. They are running with Clinton Rules again and this time they are going to get some grief for it.
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Update: William Donohue responded to the Edwards campaign decision:
“We will launch a nationwide public relations blitz that will be conducted on the pages of the New York Times, as well as in Catholic newspapers and periodicals. It will be on-going, breaking like a wave, starting next week and continuing through 2007. It will be an education campaign, informing the public of what he did today. We will also reach out to our allies in the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist communities. They worked with us before on many issues, and are sure to do so again. What Edwards did today will not be forgotten.”
The question is, will they work with a man who went on the radio and said:
“Just imagine if a white guy is performing oral sex on a statue of Martin Luther King with an erection. Do you need to see it to know it’s ugly?”
and
“Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay?
And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. “
Racial bigotry, bizarre and vulgar sexual images, anti-semitism and anal sex all in two little quotes. He’s quite the fine representative for conservatives all over the nation.
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