Guess! That! Party!: For Three Nights Running, NBCNews Fails To ID Spitzer As A Dem

ABCNews and even Katie Couric managed to do so once, at least.

But NBCNews? The most unashamedly partisan network on TV?

Nope. By NBC's lights, Elliot Spitzer belongs to the Crusading Prosecutor Party. Or maybe the Man Who Fell Due To His Own Personal Failings and Whose Flaws Cannot Possibly Reflect Whatsoever On His Political Party Party.

Here's a related complaint: When the left makes an issue of media failings, the MSM falls over itself to either 1) correct those alleged failings or 2) defend themselves and claim they're doing their jobs just fine.

Steven Colbert poked fun at the media for being (hah!) lapdogs for Bush. They all vowed to be tougher and stop giving him the free pass he'd enjoyed for five years. SNL, which is basically just Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch with recurring characters, knocked the media for fawning over Barack Obama. Suddenly they decided they had to start actually covering Obama like a political candidate rather than the Risen Christ.

On the right, we've been knocking the "Obamessiah" goofery for a frigging year. Did anyone notice? Nope. It took the left-wing crew at SNL to get the media's attention.

They don't even bother responding to us on the right, even in a clear-cut and provable systemic and deliberate case of a bias such as this. They don't even bother defending themselves. They just ignore us. Because they're not even reading us and even if they did, what we think just doesn't matter.

When various leftist bloggers attack MSM figures, the response is usually fairly immediate. Joe Klein spent weeks defending himself from lefty attacks; Paul Krugman just posted a blog entry defending himself against the charge he had dared to deny the divinity of Barack Obama.

But they don't even bother acknowledging the most obviously-verifiable criticisms of the right. Not even an acknowledgment.

Politically, you are what you read, and culturally, you are whose opinions you give a crap about.

By their very reading habits and exquisite concern for the opinions of leftwing bloggers, they give the game away. I could spend three weeks attacking Joe Klein; I'd never get a response. Because not only is he not reading me, he also doesn't even know anyone who may be reading me and might forward my criticisms to him. And even if such a bizarre congruence of improbabilities to conspire together, he wouldn't bother responding because, hey, I'm just a nutty rightwinger and anything I have to say is, by definition, the ravings of dangerously insane schizophrenic.

Howard Kurtz styles himself as an objective media critic. He also covers blogs... mostly leftwing blogs, of course, but once in a while he'll drop a mention to Instapundit or Powerline.

Is he ever going to get around to addressing what is a clear and easily provable case of systematic MSM bias? Or is the problem for Howie that the case is so clear-cut and so damning that he dares not even mention it, for his liberal media pals not only have no defense for their behavior, but insist on continuing it?

posted by Ace at 10:28 AM

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