Topic: Accuracy in Media
Today's alternate-universe quote of the day comes from Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid, who claimed in a June 21 column floating the idea that a supermarket tabloid's sensational stories about President Bush are "political dirty tricks":
The right may be saddled with the embarrassing Ann Coulter, who accused a group of 9/11 widows of being "witches" and "harpies" and enjoying their husbands' deaths, but the left has to answer for Wayne Madsen, who is sticking by his sensational claim that President George Bush is having an extramarital affair with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Madsen's main offense here is being a source for a supermarket tabloid. Let's see ... Coulter: Hundreds of thousands of books in print, currently at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, appears on Today and Jay Leno. Madsen: Uh ... never heard of him. Not exactly the equivalent that Kincaid wants you to think.
Kincaid also plays the liberal-tabloid-media canard, noting that "one of the main financial sponsors" of American Media, Inc., publisher of the tabloids that are printing the sleazy Bush articles to which Kincaid is taking offense, "is Evercore Partners, an investment firm whose chairman is former Clinton Administration Treasury official Roger C. Altman," darkly suggesting there are "politics involved with the latest attack on Bush."
As we've previously noted, the Evercore-American Media connection is one that the ConWeb likes to haul out when it's convenient, ignoring the fact that the tabs also exposed Jesse Jackson's love child and repeated affair allegations about Bill Clinton. We don't recall Kincaid getting his knickers in a twist about that. In other words, in Kincaid's view, tabloids are truthful when they report nasty gossip about Democrats but are lying when they report nasty gossip about Republicans. (NewsMax has a particularly extreme love-hate relationship with the tabloids.)
With Kincaid's history of factually deficient attacks, obsession with lesbianism and the dubious insinuation contained here, a more apt person to whom Kincaid should be likening Madsen is not Coulter but himself.
Posted by Terry K.
at 6:13 PM EDT
