Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard uses a Nov. 28 NewsBusters post to howl that Washington Post is "looking for dirt on the current Republican presidential frontrunner," New Gingrich. How? By tweeting that he is seeking "outlandish/incorrect predictions and quotes from Newt Gingrich's past."
Um, Noel? That's called crowdsourcing. And checking the veracity of statements Gingrich has made in the past isn't "dirt" -- it's fact-checking.
Sheppard went on to howl, "What would one expect from a newspaper that only five months ago called for readers to sift through former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's email messages?" That's crowdsourcing too, Noel. If you had a large cache of documents you wanted to sort through quickly -- like the 24,000 Palin emails -- you would do the same thing.
But because the Media Research Center is so paranoid and unaware of legitimate newsgathering methods, Sheppard's stupid meme was picked up by his boss, Brent Bozell, who went on Fox News to rant about it and demand that Blake be fired:
This is what we've been saying for a year. The Obama team can't run on its message. The only thing they can run on is character assassination. Fine, that's politics. That's something that the Obama team might do. But for the media to be complicity in this, for the media to be participatory. And now you've got this person just putting it out on the Internet in open, help me crucify Newt Gingrich, we want him next. You feel like they got fangs or something and blood coming down the sides of their mouth.
If Bozell is really serious about the media not getting involved in politics, he should tell the person who runs his own "news" organization, Terry Jeffrey of CNSNews.com, to stick to reporting the news and stop his character assassination of President Obama and his wife.
