This week in the Guardian, I argue that the so-called liberal media are up to their old Clinton-era tricks: coddling the right lest they be accused of liberal bias.
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"Dan Kennedy ... exercises the blogger's imperative to bloviate beyond his expertise."
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Media Nation is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Some rights reserved. You must attribute this work to Media Nation (with link). For more information, please contact Dan Kennedy at da {dot} kennedy {at} neu {dot} edu.Winner of a 2011 CBS Boston "Most Valuable Blogger" Award.
Heh. As you observe, ’twas ever thus (at least for the last 18 or so years). Notice Friedman today? Somerby did.
“The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” ”
Gee, it wasn’t “the right”, Tom. It was your very own New York Times.
Alas, most of the country is brainwashed beyond reasoned debate that the “media is librul!”
(gee I wish there was a “preview”)
Whitewater wasn’t bogus and plenty of people were found guilty of all kinds of crimes during the investigation.
Prosecutorial misconduct run amok. And, needless to say, the goal was to get the Clintons. Didn’t happen.
Wiser words were never spoken:
The trouble these days is that one of our two major parties has run entirely off the rails. And our media system, dependent as it is on false notions of objectivity, rarely acknowledges it.
The media’s first obligation should be to the truth – not to some phony notion of journalistic balance. Evidently they have learned nothing after all these years.
Great column. You’re in top form Dan.
I appreciated the link to the Google book that discusses the skepticism of journalistic objectivity. To paraphrase, if I follow it correctly, “objectivity” doesn’t imply a naive notion that journalists are free of bias. Quite the contrary, it assumes it, and says the way to overcome this bias is to employ a “transparent approach to evidence”. Objectivity achieved by use of scientific method, as much as possible, as opposed to an “aim”. Good stuff.
“Prosecutorial misconduct run amok. And, needless to say, the goal was to get the Clintons. Didn’t happen.”
True, it didn’t get the Clintons – but it got a whole lotta FOBs involved in the S&L scandal, land deals, all kinds of crap at the SBA down there and everything else.
For those people interested in what really happened down there, read Martin Gross’ “The Great Whitewater Fiasco,” Roger Morris’ “Partners in Power,” and “Arkansas Mischief,” by James MacDougal and former Globie Curtis Wilkie. All of these books document all kinds of evidence and information that Ken Starr, for whatever reason, never got a hold of, that shows the Clintons were involved in all kinds of prosecutable things down there. But like almost everything these people have done, they simply skated from it.
Sorry, Tony, but if the Clintons had been gettable, they would have been gotten. Never have so many tried so hard for so long.
Dan, when you submit your column to The Guardian, do you spell it ‘favorable’ and a macro on the other end transcribes it to ‘favourable’?
Laurence; I don’t know if they use a macro, but yes. Sometimes I try to help — I usually give them organisation all on my own now. But, essentially, the Guardian runs everything through a Britishizer on their end.