Molly Liley, Who Believes Jews Control the Newspapers, Placed on Administrative Leave By NPR

I say she believes Jews control the newspapers because when her colleague offered this assessment she did not disagree.

She was the woman in the O'Keefe sting, now on leave. But you know, these tapes prove nothing because they were deceptively edited. (Despite the entirety of the tape being presented without edits, except for one passage about an overseas correspondent -- mention of which was deleted to protect him.)

We all knew that someone would print that the tapes were "misleadingly edited" and then everyone would parrot that as a reason to dismiss them. When Gennifer Flowers released her smoking-gun telephone calls with Bill Clinton, all Clinton had to do was pay a single detective-to-the-stars (now in jail, I believe) to make the paid-for claim that the tapes were "edited" or "altered" and that's all it took as far as an excuse for the media to do what it wanted to do in the first place -- completely embargo them.

Why look how terribly popular the "NPR tapes misleadingly edited" story has gotten in the media. Who could have guessed.

Reality TV features a lot of assholes. A lot of the time, the assholes will claim that they're not assholes at all; they just got an "asshole edit." They will claim that there were plenty of times they weren't being an asshole, but of course those moments weren't shown.

Well, of course they weren't. Because they're normal. What assholes don't realize is that most people have lives filled chiefly with those moments. Whereas, for an asshole, it's a bit of a highlight reel.

The other thing reality tv assholes do is to ignore the real reasons for people believing them to be assholes and instead focus on a series of asshole moves they didn't make -- like, instead of a reality TV asshole addressing the fact he spent an entire show lying and whining like a bitch, he'll say "I never stole anything."

Well no. No one accused you of that. That's not the reason people think you're an asshole, which is the lying, whining like a bitch thing. Talk some about that.

No? Don't want to? Yeah, figured. Asshole.

NPR has a couple of people who turned out to be reality TV assholes, and they're going with both of the go-to reality TV asshole spins. Telling you about all the times they weren't being assholes, but that wasn't aired; and about all the sins they didn't commit while ignoring the ones they were actually caught on tape committing.

Broadcast journalist Al Tompkins said he was initially outraged by what he heard in that first, shorter video by O'Keefe. Tompkins now teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"What I saw was an executive at NPR expressing overtly political opinions that I was really uncomfortable with," Tompkins said. "Particularly the way the video was edited, it just seemed he was spouting off about practically everything."

But Tompkins said his mind was changed by watching that two-hour version.

"I tell my children there are two ways to lie," Tompkins said. "One is to tell me something that didn't happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen. I think they employed both techniques in this."

Sacramento, Calif.-based digital forensic consultant Mark Menz also reviewed both tapes at my request. He has done extensive video analyses for federal agencies and corporations.

"From my personal opinion, the short one is definitely edited in a form and fashion to lead you to a certain conclusion — you might say it's looking only at the dirty laundry," Menz said. He drew a distinction between that and a compressed news story.

Right, O'Keefe should have featured a story highlighting all the unobjectionable, non-asshole things Schiller said. That would have been really, really interesting, huh?

This is what Reality TV assholes always say. "I got the asshole edit." Um, if you didn't say those asshole things, no one could have made an asshole edit.

I like how NPR just blithely says that their "expert" drew a "distinction" between this tape and the typical "compressed news story."

Let me ask NPR this: If Sarah Palin gives a speech and says 50 things that aren't wrong and 1 thing that's wrong (or debatable, or polarizing), which statement do they lead with?

Gimme a break.

On the shorter tape, for instance, one of the fake donors is heard assailing a "Zionist" influence on the media — and Liley, NPR's senior director of institutional giving, is heard responding affirmingly.

The O'Keefe associate posing as potential donor Ibrahim Kassam says NPR is "one of the few places that has the courage to present it [fairly]. There's kind of a joke that we used to call it National Palestinian Radio."

Some laughter follows. But the shorter tape does not include Ron Schiller immediately telling the two men that donors cannot expect to influence news coverage.

"There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form," Schiller says on that longer tape, in one of several such remarks.

Tompkins found that meaningful, noting that Ron Schiller was a fundraiser, not an official affecting the newsroom.

"The message that he said most often — I counted six times: He told these two people that he had never met before that you cannot buy coverage," Tompkins said. "He says it over and over and over again."

How is that misleading? It wasn't O'Keefe's charge (nor my charge) that NPR is taking money in exchange for its liberal spin -- quite the opposite. The whole point is that you don't need to pay them to be liberal -- they are dyed-in-the-wool liberal and will be such even if you pay them to be evenhanded (which is what I assume federal subsidies are supposed to encourage, but in fact do not).

No one's accusing NPR of being liberal because George Soros is bribing them to. We're accusing them of being so liberal they would rather lose all funding than pursue a fair and balanced line.

So what the hell does this context of NPR saying it can't be bought matter? That is no one's frickin' charge. O'Keefe did not make that charge. No one does.

So here's Reality TV Asshole spin number two: Let me ignore all those egregious things I was shown doing in order to note that I did not actually murder anyone while being followed around by cameras.

Okay, fine, you didn't look for bribes. Congratulations. Now can you address the actual charges against you?

No? Nothing? Okay. That's what I figured.

There you go -- "misleadingly edited," the story the Make Believe Media was waiting for, so it could refer back to this as disposing of the tapes entirely.

I have to ask-- what the heck is Glenn Beck's The Blaze doing pushing the misleadingly-edited meme?

Thanks to Ogre Gunner.

posted by Ace at 06:28 PM

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