Topic: NewsBusters
A Jan. 9 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard laments the existence of "a campaign started by the far-left website the Huffington Post to get people to pull their money from the larger national banks and deposit their savings into 'smaller, community-oriented financial institutions.'" Sheppard asserts that "an organized run on these banks" could result in "more financial insolvencies, layoffs, and further damage to an already teetering economy." Adds Sheppard: "With ten percent unemployment, and America's banks struggling to get back on their feet, ABC should be ashamed of itself for reporting on this campaign by Huffington and her ilk."
Sheppard omits the full purpose of the campaign: to move money into smaller institutions "that generally avoided the reckless investments and schemes that helped cause the financial crisis."
Which brings us to the hypocrisy part -- while Sheppard wants to save big banks that had to be bailed out, his NewsBusters colleague Tom Blumer has long been rooting for the demise of automakers that accepted a federal bailout.
Indeed, the day before Sheppard's post, Blumer was attacking "Government/General Motors" (such posts are usually accompanied by the graphic shown here) cheering that it was about to lose its long-held title as America's biggest automaker. Blumer snorted that "the company walked away from about $30 billion in debt in the bankruptcy process and waltzed out of bankruptcy court after having received over $50 billion in government aid."
And in a Jan. 11 post, Blumer bashed both GM And Chrysler for "vaguely holding forth on the prospect of reopening previously shuttered production facilities," chortling that the companies' sales don't justify it, and happily noting that Ford, which did not take bailout money, "is stealing the show, in one case on the energy-efficient turf GM and Chrysler that is supposedly going to be their specialty."
NewsBusters needs to explain why it wants bailed-out automakers to die -- which would result in, in Sheppard's words, "financial insolvencies, layoffs, and further damage to an already teetering economy" -- but not bailed-out banks.
