Topic: NewsBusters
In a Sept. 13 NewsBusters post, Noel Sheppard declared that a New York Times article on Sarah Palin's years as Wasilla mayor and Alaska governor is a "hit piece" that "attacked Palin early and often." But nowhere does Sheppard dispute any of the information in the article -- specifically, the article's assertion that Palin "pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance," as well as hired "at least five schoolmates" to government posts "often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages."
Therefore, we can conclude hat Sheppard thinks the truth is an "attack" and a "hit piece."
It's worth noting that Sheppard's MRC used to have a different view of government officials hiring friends to fill jobs. For instance, a search for "clinton" and "cronies" in the MRC's search engine returns 59 articles.
Nevertheless, Sheppard went on, in a Sept. 14 post, to bash the Times for devoting "over 6,000 words to attacking anything called Palin in Sunday's edition" -- a number Sheppard came up with by adding two columns by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich to the above article and a second that, in Sheppard's words, was "questioning Palin's husband's role in their state's government." Sheppard failed to weigh that number against the total number of articles (dozens) and words (tens, if not hundreds, of thousands) found in the typical Sunday Times.
