Topic: NewsBusters
From an Oct. 31 NewsBusters post by Kyle Drennen:
In his "Final Word" on Sunday’s "Face the Nation" on CBS, host Bob Schieffer denounced a fake news conference held by FEMA officials in the wake of the California wildfires. Not content to just say the staged conference was a bad mistake, Schieffer decided to be as arrogant and condescending as possible:
The fake FEMA news conference was merely a "bad mistake"? Drennen then goes for the equivocation card:
Schieffer went on to denounce the "softball questions" asked by FEMA employees who posed as reporters. It is interesting to note that Schieffer did not condemn ABC host George Stephanopoulos in similar fashion when the former Clinton advisor touted an email from the Clinton campaign during a discussion of the September 26 Democratic debate on "Good Morning America." It is also unlikely we will hear a word from Schieffer about MSNBC host and debate moderator, Chris Matthews, writing a campaign speech for Barack Obama one day prior to Tuesday night’s Democratic debate.
How are these equivalent situations? Unlike FEMA, Stephanopoulos and Matthews did not stage anything and present it as something it wasn't.
Going on to accuse Schieffer of not giving "any credit to FEMA for the successful response to the wildfires," Drennen concluded:
Well, FEMA did do a good job helping victims during this disaster, but the mainstream media has been determined to only look for what went wrong.
Is Drennen so ideologically wed to the Bush administration that he can't offer an honest criticism of an obviously stupid move and must denigrate those who do criticize it as "arrogant and condescending" people who "only look for what went wrong." Well, it was wrong, dude! Why shouldn't it be criticized? More importantly, why won't Drennen or anyone else at the MRC criticize it as anything harsher than a "mistake"? We suspect if this happened under a Democratic administration, we'd never hear the end of it from Drennen and the boys.
