Media Matters Fisks The Times Over Blago
THE UK press might well take over the world. This on the Times’s trreatment of the Rod Blagojevich story:
We don’t normally comment on foreign press coverage of the Beltway, but this news report from Murdoch’s Times of London regarding the Blago saga is so egregious, so dishonest and so bad, we thought it deserved attention. Especially in light of the fact how we noted last week that Murdoch’s WSJ seemed to be straining the facts in order to hype the Blago story with an anti-Obama spin. Question: Has Murdoch issued marching orders to all his news orgs about this ”scandal”?
Times of London headline: “Senate scandal snares Obama’s chief aide.”
The aide in question is Rahm Emanuel and as we pointed out last week Emanuel is not the target of any Blago-related investigation because he did nothing wrong. But the fact that Emanuel was referenced on the Blago wiretaps doing nothing wrong means to the Times that he’s been “ensnared.”
It gets worse. Here’s the lead as written by Sarah Baxter [emphasis added]:
The bullish, foul-mouthed but effective Chicago arm-twister Rahm Emanuel has come under pressure to resign as Barack Obama’s chief of staff after it was revealed that he had been captured on court-approved wire-taps discussing the names of candidates for Obama’s Senate seat.
That’s a new claim and the newspaper makes it in the article’s very first sentence: Emanuel is under pressure to resign?! By whom, is the obvious question. Behold the Times’ answer: “Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tax reform lobbyist.” We kid you not. A professional GOP partisan throws out a pointless silly claim that Emanuel should be fired and Murdoch’s newspaper treats it as breaking news.
Yeah, the listen to the UK press on US politics. We rule!
Posted: 16th, December 2008 | In: Twitterings Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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December 16th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Er, I hate to break the news to you, but the Economist is in deep doodah all of its very own; for ‘grown so much that a majority of their readers are in the US’ read ‘lost so much of its educated readership that it is having to rely on brain-dead Americans to prop it up’.
The Economist’s problem is that it completely failed to see the global melt-down of the financial markets coming; what makes the situation even worse is that the policies it has flogged for these many years are the very policies which resulted in the meltdown.
If you can’t spot a once in a century catastrophe when it’s happening, you can’t expect people to take you seriously; its’ credibility gap is too big to bridge now.
I don’t know whether Michael Lewis ever did say, of its writers:
“If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.”
not least because even if he didn’t at the time, he would now, but it really does sum up just why the claim that the Economist provides straight journalism is risible. You would be marginally better off citing the News of the World as your source…
December 16th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
The Saturday Chicago Tribune seemed to verify the Times” conjectures of connections between Obama’s team and their previous ally Blago (Axelrod and Emanuel were quoted a couple years ago they showed Blago how to win elections). To be Fair, Blago who has been elected to Congress and Governorship from Chicago (many times over the Obama candidate) should be given the chance to investigate himself and staff a la Obama and declare, “I investigated myself and found my staff and me to be perfect!”
The poor press coverage is getting to be a real big problem in the US with the mainstream press and network comedians constantly kicking the dead horse bush without a clue, but a blind eye to the corrupt Chicago Dems and the intellectually bankrup Clintonites rising like so many monsters from a Living Dead movie sequel. When Blago gets caught on tape, they suffer amnesia along with the rest of Daley’s machine and want to trash Bush, Nixon, etc.
The London Economist has grown so much that a majority of their readers are in the US. There just isn’t any straight journalism in the US to read especially with all the consolidation and pay for play advertising in the large and small markets.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Be nice, Anorka.
News Corp is dead in the water, the Bancroft family is laughing all the way to the bank, and poor Rupert has a lot of very pissed off shareholders asking themselves why the f*ck they should be subsidising his political obsessions when they could be putting their money into Ponzi frauds instead.
Rupert’s acquisition of Dow Jones, at the very top of the market, with hugely leveraged financing, was a masterpiece of bad judgement, demonstrating once and for all that the old maestro knows as much about making money as Madoff does…