Liberal Media Bias???

James Taranto emasculates David Carr, master analyst who openly was skeptic of Media Bias to the Far Left:

This columnist both laughed and cringed at the "Obamaphone Lady" video that last week got wide play on YouTube, with boosts from Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. It's one of a series of interviews someone using the handle RealFreedom1776 shot outside a Mitt Romney appearance in Bedford, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. The Service Employees International Union was staging a protest against the Romney rally. The Obamaphone Lady, who as far as we know hasn't been otherwise identified, is a middle-aged black woman with a loud, gravelly voice. She exuberantly explains why she supports President Obama's re-election: "Everybody in Cleveland [unintelligible] minority got Obama phone! Keep Obama in president, you know? He gave us a phone!" She turns out to be propagating an urban legend, one we'd previously heard from conservative friends. The "phone" part is true. There is a federally mandated, state-administered program known as Lifeline that subsidizes telephone service for low-income subscribers. But the "Obama" part is imagined. As Snopes.com explains, Lifeline dates back to the 1980s, and the Dayton Daily News reported in August that Ohio expanded it in 2008 to include cellphones. "Just How Racist Is the 'Obama Phone' Video?" asked The Atlantic Wire's Elspeth Reeve in the title of a Thursday post. "It's totally and obviously racist according to some racists who rushed to a 'White Pride' Internet forum as soon as they heard about it on Rush Limbaugh's show," she answered, making an appeal to an extremely dubious authority. Reeve made a more plausible argument that "it's racial," to wit: "The Obama Phone video belongs to a genre popular on conservative blogs in which poor people, usually black, confirm conservatives' worst 47-percent fears by saying they can get something for nothing because Obama's in office. The message is, 'Here's what Obama's supporters really look like.' " Then, in a follow-up post, she asserted: "This video, if placed in a Romney ad, would make George H.W. Bush's 1988 Willie Horton ad look subtle by comparison: the other guy is supported by scary black people, vote Republican!" (She quickly notes that the Romney campaign hasn't touched this video, though she neglects to mention that the 1988 Horton ad was made by a political action committee, not the Bush campaign itself.) It seems to us that Reeve is guilty of considerable overstatement here. The Obamaphone Lady isn't scary (Horton was, though primarily for nonracial reasons). She's comical. On the other hand, the joke is at her expense, and there is no denying it has strong racial overtones. It's not hard to imagine a white-supremacist caricature looking very much like this video. That's why we cringed even as we laughed. And yet. How exactly does the work of the Obamaphone Lady videographer and those who have promoted his work differ from that of Alexandra Pelosi? In 2008 Miss Pelosi, a daughter of the then-House speaker, produced an HBO documentary, "Right America: Feeling Wronged," that strung together 45 minutes of footage in which John McCain supporters said crazy, foolish and sometimes bigoted things, all for the purpose of showing that Obama's opponent was supported by scary white people. When the Tea Party arrived on the scene the following year, many in the media attempted the same trick, though they came up with surprisingly little material. There are good reasons to object to such work, especially when it's produced by purportedly impartial journalists. But it won't do to treat it as a gross offense only when the right does it.

Yes, when the Left does this, it's "a good thing..." Alexandra Pelosi is a total whore.... The acorn didn't fall far from the tree there.......