The Evilosity Of The RightWing Noise Machine

by tristero

In case you have any doubt about how insidious and dangerous the lies are that the rightwing spreads, here’s a little tale for you.

Some of you may recall this report by Lara Logan about the brutal fighting on Haifa Street and how, very unusually, she circulated a plea for people to watch the report online because CBS News was unwilling to broadcast it.

Well, recently, I was at dinner with a friend who is a major journalist at a major media outlet in New York City. (I will not identify the person further, including whether my friend is male or female, or what kind of media s/he works for – video, print, or online). In the course of the conversation, I brought up the Lara Logan video and s/he said, with certain authority, “I know about that. Y’know, there’s a lot of controversy because she used footage from al Qaeda in the reporting.”

“Wha?” sez I, “I never heard that.”

“Yes,” said, my friend. “I was searching around for it and saw there was a huge controversy about her sources. That could very well have been the reason they didn’t broadcast it. After all, it’s not like there’s much reluctance anymore to hold back on damaging reports on the Bush administration.”

I promised to look into it. And I did. It turns out that Michelle Malkin and friends have been up to their old tricks again. You can read all about it at this link to Media Channel, but the short version: it’s a bullshit insinuation meant to smear CBS and Logan, who has done some of the finest network reporting on the Bush/Iraq war.

And it worked, My friend, a highly-respected journalist (and rightly so), was gulled into questioning Logan’s integrity.

Now before you jump down her/his throat and say, “Your friend should have known better,” I should mention that my friend’s beat is not Iraq or the Bush administration, or the rightwing. Even so, I’ll concede that perhaps s/he should have known better in this particular instance. But the larger point is that there is so much garbage like this being put out every day – Obama the Manchurian Candidate, Clinton the gossip-monger to name a recent set of whoppers – that it is impossible for anyone who is (rightly) skeptical of all public figures and celebrities to separate the truth from ALL the nonsense the rightwing puts out without serious digging.

And that’s the objective of slime like Malkin and Co., to pollute the discourse so it cannot be trusted, even when it’s telling the truth.

Now, why didn’t CBS broadcast Logan’s report? I suspect that among the reasons were the one they actually gave out, that it is was too graphic for primetime. Click on the link above and make up your own mind. And I think my friend truly underestimates how much all media, especially CBS, self-censors information that is damaging to Bush, even at this late date. But one thing is certain: Logan’s reporting has been excellent and honest. To insinuate that she is serving as a conduit for al Qaeda propaganda is outrageous, even if it’s not surprising behavior from Malin.