Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters' Matthew Balan went on a tirade Monday, devoting two entire posts to attacking liberal blogger Max Blumenthal, as well as CNN's featuring of Blumenthal's video nailing College Republicans who support the Iraq war but won't enter the military.
Balan's first July 30 post smears Blumenthal as a "left-wing hack" and his video as a "hack job," but he offers no evidence of the "hackery" he accuses Blumenthal of. Balan is also inordinately fond of saying "left-wing"; he makes use of the terms "left-wing Internet clips," "left-wing Internet production," "Blumenthal’s left-wing associations," "the left-wing writer," and "left-wing partisan journalist."
In his other post, Balan again references "Blumenthal latest [sic] left-wing hack job." he also takes issue with the CNN descriptor "a man named Max Blumenthal":
Blumenthal is not merely a "writer" and/or a "man." He has written for "The Nation" magazine, "The Huffington Post," and for "Media Matters for America," the left-wing "watchdog" group. All three institutions are part of the radical left-wing, a label that Blumenthal apparently rejects, as [CNN's Josh] Levs repeated in the first segment.
Crikey! We work for a "radical left-wing" institution? But since the Media Research Center -- where Balan is a news analyst -- is the ideological opposite of Media Matters, doesn't that mean the MRC is a "radical right-wing" institution? And, thus, shouldn't Balan refer to the MRC as that? We will.
Further, Balan gets it wrong by claiming that the College Republicans video was not "Blumenthal['s] latest left-wing hack job." That was posted July 19; Blumenthal's actual latest video, posted July 27, takes a look inside John Hagee's Christians-for-Israel gathering.
UPDATE: Brent Baker toned down Balan's rhetoric in turning the posts into a July 31 CyberAlert item, deleting Balan's "hack" attacks and his description of Media Matters, et al, as "radical left-wing" institutions.
