Posted by Kyle-Anne Shiver Mar 9th 2010 at 10:24 am in Featured Story, MSNBC, Mainstream Media, NBC, media bias One must at least credit NBC’s Chuck Todd with one virtue. He is utterly transparent.
When real “journalist” Todd – Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News and the co-hose of The Daily Rundown — gave this impish put down of what he calls, “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” his resentment, fear and school-boy petulance could not have been clearer to any sentient observer.Such a pity, really. A grown man reduced to whining in front of the White House makes his viewers so embarrassed for him that it’s painful to watch. He should have saved all that peevish poppycock for Al Gore, the inventor of the internet. For, in reality, the saving grace of journalism today – the only thing that gives these leftist buffoons in the MSM even a tiny shred of credibility – is the internet’s check and balance on their politically driven narratives.
Flashback: Dan Rather, 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004.
This was the program, later dubbed “Rathergate,” in which Dan Rather ignominiously lit the match that started the fire that ended his long career. It was a mere two months before the presidential election, in which military service records played a huge part Only three years since 9/11, and only one year following the invasion of Iraq, voters’ minds were clearly focused on national security issues. The Democrats had nominated a man, John Kerry, who was like George W. Bush a Vietnam-era veteran, although Kerry had actually spent 16 whole weeks in Vietnam before invaliding himself out of the line of fire by claiming his third Purple Heart.
The Bush-disparaging documents, which Dan Rather hailed as “authenticated” were not, in fact, authentic. It is undeniable that if it had not been for conscientious sleuthing on the part of bloggers – most notably Charles Johnson on Little Green Footballs and Power Line, not to mention the driving of the story by Drudge, the American public might very well have been completely bamboozled by CBS on this most sensitive issue of that presidential campaign.
Now, it’s not at all difficult to imagine why liberal partisans in the MSM were quiteeager to disparage (evidently at any cost) the military service record of President George W. Bush. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, had been the subject of a most unflattering book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak out against John Kerry, written by John O’Neill and published in August, just a month after Kerry’s nomination. John Kerry had followed the national security theme of the Democratic convention by accepting his nomination with the now infamous line: “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”
It didn’t take a genius or even much of a sleuth to see through the hypocritical nature of John Kerry’s using his military record to shore up his bid for the presidency. If Kerry was known to Boomer voters outside his own state, it was only in connection to his flamboyant antics as a Vietnam anti-war spokesman and organizer for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry was remembered, not for his service to his country in Vietnam, but for his activities as a war protestor and his completely unsubstantiated claims before Congress of “war crimes” and “atrocities” committed by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam.
Kerry had returned from the war to become one of its most vociferous critics. He participated in staged political theater, in which he threw away his service medals – or ribbons, or something. Those same medals, including his Silver Star, later found themselves on the walls of his Capitol Hill office, however, and he was forced to admit that the medals he had thrown at the White House in protest in 1971 were, in fact, phonies – not his own. He was also forced to admit that his supposedly emotional and purely spontaneous speech that day had been the work of Robert Kennedy speechwriter, Adam Walinsky, who had also tutored him on how to make the speech appear authentic.
(These details from the book: Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History; p. 135-136)
These were the kind of embarrassing details John Kerry wanted to hide from the American public and they were the details that obviously prompted Dan Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, to disregard all fundamental journalistic ethics to rush their fake documents to air in front of curious millions only two months before the election.
So, when supposedly real journalists, like Chuck Todd, disparage “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” what they are doing is as transparent as the childish petulance in their demeanors.
The MSM fears bloggers like the plague. From Rathergate to Climategate, bloggers get the truth out.
In reality, bloggers are the only thing standing between the MSM and the complete monopoly of the news by their leftwing ideology.
Such a pity that they’ve been reduced to such a disgraceful lot as Chuck Todd.
Big Journalism
