by John Nolte The other night, a funny thing happened on the way to an idea… With an absurd attack against Sarah Palin, the MSM proved a point I was going to make about the potent power of Twitter better than I ever could.
But, first, a little background.
Let me see a show of hands. How many of you sit home frustrated by MSM bias, lies, misinformation and double standards?
Wow. That many.
So my idea was to write an article encouraging people (meaning, you) to sign up for a Twitter account and help us to smoke out MSM bias — to urge you to tweet about it and sound the alarm online whenever you see it. It’s a ridiculously simple process and not only will you feel better, but word will spread and the culprits will know you’re spreading that word. The idea most certainly isn’t to get the hopelessly corrupt media to stop being hopelessly corrupt. If plummeting circulation rates and embarrassing ratings can’t get them to change their ways, nothing will. But more people policing the MSM and spreading the word on Twitter is a beautiful thing, good for America — and what better way to expose them than through the art of mockery?
For example…
The MSM has set for themselves a Sarah Palin Standard whereas any perceived mistake the Governor makes becomes an instant part of the noisy MSM narrative. The idea, obviously, is to destroy her. And yet, when she hits a grand slam like she did with her speech in Madison Saturday, the coverage pales in comparison to, say, when the MSM spends 10 days blaming her for those heinous murders in Tucson.
With this double standard in mind the other night, I suggested to my Twitter family (and yes, it feels like family) that we tweak and make fun of the MSM for all but ignoring (or obfuscating) the sharpest attack on President Obama from a potential GOP challenger yet.
So it went a little something like this:
Hi @mikeallen: Did you know @politico’s only coverage of Palin’s base-energizing #WI speech was a misleading @AndyBarr34 item. Can u cover?Or, regarding another glaring MSM double standard: (you have to open the link to get the joke)
Hi @davidgregory I’ve attached video of racial incident involving Tea Party. Hot stuff. Have u covered? http://bit.ly/hbJ1yGAgain, no one here is trying to convince anyone in the MSM to do their jobs honorably. We all know that’s a complete waste of time. But what isn’t a waste of time is pointing out the MSM’s glaring double standards to as many people as possible. These tweets can get re-tweeted, the effect can be exponential, and those addressed in the tweets know this. All good.
To be clear, you don’t call anyone names or swear at them or get angry. You tease them some and have a little fun pointing out their biases in the ultimate hope that others re-tweet you and the message gets out to as many people as possible. And then you move on to the next biased “journalist.”
Now, I don’t know Rebecca Mansour, we’ve never met, but she’s one of three-plus thousand people following me on Twitter and I’m one of the three-plus thousand following her. I work for Andrew Breitbart, she works for Sarah Palin — so it kinda makes sense — and like a few others, she joined in on my reindeer games. A sample here, here, and here.
But guess what happened?
The MSM freaked out.
Obviously annoyed at the very idea anyone would question or tease them, Slate’s Dave Weigel apparently got the ball rolling by spinning Mansour’s playful tweets into this full-blown headline:
Pay Attention to Sarah Palin!See what Weigel did there? An obvious tweak at the MSM’s biases is twisted into a completely phony story about Palin whining about not getting enough MSM attention.
In the two years and eight months that Sarah Palin has been a political celebrity, I’ve never heard a conservative complain about the media ignoring her. Not until last night.
But wait! There’s more.
Somewhere out there some form of a JournOlist still exists and so the same media that couldn’t quite bring themselves to give a home-run, base-energizing Palin speech anywhere near the attention they gave a crosshairs map the suspected Tucson shooter never saw, DID see a story in a Palin aide joking about media coverage on Twitter. But only because they could twist it into a negative against Palin. See: Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.
A few tweets, the MSM gets irked, and once again gives guys like me an opportunity to expose their insidious agenda.
That’s the power of Twitter.
It’s a beautiful thing. You really should join us.
Big Government
