Topic: Newsmax
As expected, Newsmax's Ronald Kessler has been reliably shilling for Mitt Romney all month, but he takes it to a new, journalistically dishonest level in an Oct. 29 article.
In it, he lets Romney adviser Bay Buchanan blather on and on about how well Romney is purportedly doing:
Republican intensity supporting Mitt Romney is now equal to Ronald Reagan’s during his first campaign, Bay Buchanan, a senior adviser to Romney and Reagan’s Treasury secretary, tells Newsmax.
“The intensity level is remarkable,” says Buchanan, who was also the treasurer of Reagan’s presidential primary campaigns in 1976 and 1980 and national treasurer of Reagan’s general election presidential campaigns in 1980 and in 1984.
“It’s not only showing up in the polls, but if you go out in the states as I have, in Florida and in Wisconsin, the excitement level is something that I haven't seen since Reagan,” she says.
At a rally in Colorado, “The forum sat 10,000 people and 10,000 people packed in there and they had to turn people away,” Buchanan says. “In Leesburg, Va., there were 8,000 people in the line to get in, and it was a mile long down into the main part of town.”
Buchanan says Romney’s campaign has become a movement.
Kessler makes no effort to verify anything Buchanan says, nor does he quote anyone else.
Of course, Buchanan is serving up nothing but pure, unadulterated campaign spin, and Kessler is all too eager to regurgitate it in the service of his favorite candidate.
Kessler is not the only journalist treating "Romney fauxmentum" spin as news, but his commitment to the cause is noteworthy. Remember, Kessler has a pedigree as a real reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
But Kessler has basically pissed all of that journalistic credibility away since joining Newsmax in 2006, between his embarrassing fawning over Donald Trump and -- in 2007 and now -- his slobbering over Romney.
Is Kessler happy with the trade-off, or is he now such a committed ideologue that he doesn't care about what's left of his journalistic reputation? We wonder.
