Friday, December 15, 2006

Fifth Column Enemedia Led by NYT & Aided by Drudge?

The New York Sun goes over the top in casting Matt Drudge as a liberal blogger:
Matt Drudge, who may or may not be a willing accomplice to the distortion of news reporting, must be held responsible for the dissemination of the bias in the liberal press. Studies have shown that the readership of the Times is down — as it is in other liberal publications — and so are the television ratings of the alphabet networks and CNN and MSNBC, while Fox News is up.

Nevertheless, the propaganda of the enemedia — an excellent descriptive term coined by one poster to Lucianne.com — continues to sully news coverage, thanks to Mr. Drudge. A study of press bias by a professor of political science at the University of California-Los Angeles, Tim Groseclose, listed the Drudge Report as one of the most liberal sites on the Web because it consistently posts articles from left-of-center sources.

To be fair, the Groseclose/Milyo Study noted that the Drudgereport reflected the media bias rather than focussing or spotlighting liberal media items, which of course the Groseclose study showed reflected 70% of the media---The New York Times and CBS-TV were over eighty percent, according to the ADA ratings long used by liberals to denote fidelity to their causes. The author goes on to give the media forty whacks and Pinch Sulzberger 41:
"We are not winning in Iraq." Did he really say those words? No. At Mr. Gates's confirmation hearing, Senator Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, asked him if we were winning in Iraq, and he answered, "No."

Lucianne, of course, pointed out that Mr. Gates went on to say we're not losing, either. His exact words were: "Our military forces win the battles that they fight; our soldiers have done an incredible job in Iraq. And I'm not aware of a single battle that they have lost. And I didn't want my comments to be interpreted as suggesting that they weren't being successful in their endeavors."

Mr. Gates, you can be 100% certain that everything you say from now on as secretary of defense will be misinterpreted by a certain New York publication headed by Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger.

Actually, a lot of the frauds on cable and broadcast TV actually said we are "LOSING" the war, which is even worse than "not winning," which is worse than the terse "no" of Mr. Gates. Circus performer David Gregory at NBC comes to mind, and Baby-face Russert chimed in as well. Matt Lauer has not been heard from.
This is the man who in the 1960s, according to author Harry Stein, when asked by his father whom he'd rather see shot when an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, replied: "I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country."

That statement is something Mr. Sulzberger appears to be proud of, as he repeats it from time to time. Maybe he actually believes that this lack of nationalistic empathy is necessary for good journalism. I think the truth would be a better measure of it, but the Times is continuing to put out news that is completely mendacious, even when it's not about Mr. Bush or Iraq.

It's fair to say that Pinch fits the profile that Thomas Sowell was alluding to in his excellent piece early this year on RCP that "The Fourth Estate is the Fifth Column" or, as Lucianne would put it, the "enemedia." The writer goes on the frisk and fisk the NYT for its multitudinous unforced errors and points out the following:
I was certain Pope Benedict XVI had given in to Muslim pressure. Why? Because the New York Times reported this in a headline: "In Reversal, Pope Backs Turkey's Bid to Join European Union." Of course it was posted on the Drudge Report. Was it true? Not according to Richard Neuhaus, the editor and founder of First Things, a distinguished religious publication. On December 1, he wrote, "Even by today's standards, this is a breathtaking instance of journalistic shoddiness, if not downright dishonesty."

But mendacity pays in this town, whose residents survived the worst attack on this country in history, yet they still can't recognize the danger of lies in wartime if reported in the Old Gray Lady.

The enemy abroad monitors our defeatist cadres who are cluelessly following their script, which requires that turning the American public against the war is the only way they will win it---following the Vietnam template, which gorgon-in-chief Maureen at the NYT prates on bi-weekly at the very least.

The American media is a mare's nest of complex flimflammery unknowingly transmitted by gullible dupes and fellow-travellers of murderous terrorists they would never invite into their oh-so=toney salons and cocktail parties, let alone a sit-down dinner.

But these socialite-socialists just keep on being a transmission belt for defeat and proclaim on a daily basis a Recessional for American Power. Their grandkids will wear burkas and kifayehs, perhaps, and these long-gone "journalist" won't know how it happened. For their efforts, they'll have passed on to those 72....oh, never mind!

3 comments :

Anonymous said...

"The enemy abroad monitors our defeatist cadres who are cluelessly following their script, which requires that turning the American public against the war is the only way they will win it"

But can we win the war? We can, of course, indefinitely prevent the other side from winning, but can we actually defeat them?

Certainly not with our current strategy. Unless we quit talking about "democratization," and start thinking first in terms of "pacification (i.e. getting the Iraqis to accept our dominance)," there is no way that Iraq will be brought under control.

dave in boca said...

Yes, and pacifying is the only solution, which would increase the profile of hostility towards our soldiers much higher than it is already.

Rumsfeld effed up when he disregarded Shinseki even before the war started and thought he could do it on the cheap, and be rewarded with rapid oil revenues from a grateful nation.

Tommy Franks hot-footed it to Baghdad, and followed all the manuals for military security. Even Bremer didn't overlook the short-handedness of US staffing and policing and military.

Cheney's calling Rumsfeld the greatest SecDef ever makes me wonder what they're going to call him as a VP after '08.

Glaivester said...

In all due fairness, we didn't have the forces not to do it on the cheap.

Of course, Bush and Rumsfeld are to blame for the fact that there has been no move to increase our force size.