Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard surely deserves some kind of award for the amount of desperate spinning he's doing to defend his beloved Fox News when they've been caught red-handed engaging in the kind of bias he and his NewsBusters colleagues are supposed to deplore.
In a Feb. 29 post, Sheppard discusses a "Daily Show" segment in which host Jon Stewart points out that Fox News appear to be following the instructions of a Republican National Committee memo advising sympathetic pundits to distract from news of an improving economy by talking about debt, unemployment, and gas prices -- to the point that Fox's Steve Doocy actually reads from the memo on the air, then immediately follows its advice. This is the sort of thing that, when so-called liberal media outlets do it in much less blatant form (like reporting things that diverge from the right-wing agenda), NewsBusters describe as "talking points."
Sheppard responds by completely ignoring the fact that Fox News was busted quite literally reading Republican talking points and desperately trying to play a switcheroo saying that Fox News using Republican talking points somehow shows that the "liberal media" uses Democratic talking points, or something:
“You can’t do that,” Stewart exclaimed. “You just gave the game away.”
Actually, it was Stewart that gave the game away, as he exposed that much like virtually every liberal media member in the country, he is and has been rooting for Barack Obama since 2008.
It's not odd that news organizations would report the national debt, stubbornly high unemployment, and soaring gas prices.
What's odd is that for over three years, virtually every news outlet besides Fox downplayed budget deficits and the poor condition of the labor markets - and/or blamed both on former President George W. Bush - and are currently underreporting gas prices and/or making the case they're not Obama's fault.
Stewart is clearly displeased that Fox is going against this dishonest grain and actually telling its viewers the truth about these negative economic factors that threaten to derail any recovery that might now be taking root.
To Stewart, reports that undermines the President he loves should be ignored, at least until after the elections, and any outlet going against this tenet must clearly be in bed with the RNC.
It curiously doesn't bother Stewart that by withholding such information from the public virtually every other media organization including his is in bed with the DNC.
Got that? Democratic talking points are just talking points, while Republican talking points are the truth. We think.
It's not often you see someone like Sheppard making such a blatantly dishonest argument that is so desperately determined to deny reality. But, apparently, that's why he makes the big bucks as the associate editor of NewsBusters.
