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Godzilla on Lazy Journalist Island »
September 23, 2005
"Novice" Protestor Just Happens To Be ANSWER Member And Anti-War Organizer Since the 1970's
Multiple layers of painstaking editorial fact-checking, huh?
Well-- that's true, if it's a Republican or conservative activist making a claim. You can bet in that case that Lexis/Nexis gets fired up and searchin'.
But when a longtime protest-whore and ANSWER member represents herself as just an awww-shucks apolitical schoolteacher who finally decided to oppose the war -- a mainstream kinda gal, in other words -- the Washington Post prints her claims uncritically, and without any sort of fact checking at all.
Seems bloggers have one advantage over those genius j-school graduates in the press corps. Some of us know how to type "www.google.com" in an address bar and then do a search of a person's name.
It has long been claimed, even by conservatives, that press bias was not intentional, and was rather simply an effect of ideological blindness and a "willingness to believe." I am strongly beginning to doubt that.
Does anyone-- ANYONE -- think that if the WaPo interviewed a pro-life protester who claimed to have never gone to prostesting first-base before in her life (assuming they even deigned to cover such a protest, of course) they would have run her claims without checking?
Our fair-and-balanced press is determined to find a "mainstream," moderate, mom-and-pop kind of uprising against the Iraq War... and war as a general matter.
And goddamnit, if they can't find that sort of popular uprising they'll just have to help ANSWER invent it, won't they?
Thanks to Traffic Non-Santa.