Cheney has a large staff. It would have been trivial for him to give an order to put a statement together. In fact, he shouldn’t even have had to give an order. His people should have come to HIM and said: “Here boss, we’ve put together a statement for the press. If you’re happy with it, we’ll send it out.”
On Sunday, after he’d had a chance to compose himself, he should have held a brief press conference where he explained his carelessness and publicly apologized to Mr. Whittington.
Letting it fester for five days was irresponsible and weak.
Yep, you did. So much so that I almost emailed you with an apology for overlooking a post you made to me in the ‘Goodnight, Zoe’ thread and which I didn’t see till the next day. Is that why you’re puffed at me now? Cause I’m at least as utilitarian as a fencepost, you know: I can even mow lawns…although I am expecting it to get harder once the grass starts growing again.
This is from the slightly less liberal press known as the National Review, founded by Conservative bulwark William Buckley:
The author of that statement (which really should be read in context) is Byron York, author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried To Bring Down a President – And Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time. He is the White House correspondent for the NRO.
Even York can see that Cheney handled this with poor judgment.
Oh, I don’t know. I think you’re giving too much credit for civilized behavior to the press. If he’d had his staff make the statement, the press would have criticized him for hiding away and letting his staff make it, and he’d have been hounded and dogged (there’s one for the Department of Redundancy Department) everywhere he went. I would imagine also that in a press conference scenario the next day he’d have been peppered with accusatory questions about not only the shooting itself, but with further accusatory questions regarding the war and the administration in general, as the press would have most likely perceived that he would be in a weakened state and that they could perhaps get him to make a careless or angry comment that they could capitalize upon.
When the subject of bias in the media appears it is silly not to consider the consensus from a group. In other words, you are purposely ignoring were their bias is coming from: The left considers that it has to jump through many hoops just correct the mainstream bias, as for example when dealing with left bogs:
In other words, the left does not have a mainstream source that follows their lead, or have a mainstream media company that, as a consensus from the left, is considered to be “the liberal news”
As Cheney just has to say “jump” to Fox and Fox replies “how high?” with only softballs thrown at him, the bias is there all right. The right has their news. The right does know were the bias is at, and when they demand action they do get it, the mainstream in turn is shamelessly trying to emulate Fox, and many times ignores the left.
There is no need for a cite on the current state of bias once you consider this:
The right considers outfits like FOX fair and balanced or their news.
The left considers the other mainstream outfits not fair and balanced and not their news.
As the cite shows, (and you can read countless other examples at Daily Kos) the mainstream is not in tune with the left, whereas the right has a way “to catapult the propaganda”, the left can only pressure the mainstream to be more accurate, that is all.
See, the problem there is that in your pity party thread, your OP described a moment of self-reflection in which you gave the impression that you regretted being a fucking moron in all your posts. Go back and read it again, and see if it at all sounds familiar. Now re-read your posts here. They are exactly the same as your posts to the other thread I linked to (“The Right and its Persecution Complex”). It’s a good example of what I was saying about there being no noticeable difference in any of your posts.
Rather than having grown from your moment of reflection, you seem to be pretty much back in the role of an attention-starved partisan tool with no capacity for reason or learning.
Nope, wrong again. I don’t recall the exact thread but it was much more recent than that. I figure you’re just pissed now because I expressed respect to Zoe and Siege, but unintentially left you out. Fortunately now, I no longer see the need for such concern.
I agree that the points you are making here are correct; however, the reason for this state of affairs is (IMO, okay?) is decades-long liberal bias from the mainstream news media.
Regarding Cheney saying ‘jump’ to Fox, I don’t recall Clinton having any trouble getting on Larry King or David Letterman’s show, and they certainly have a greater following than dailykos.com.
I’m on the right and I don’t necessarily consider them fair and balanced. I do think they serve to counterbalance to a very large degree the leftward bias that has existed for decades on the part of the mainstream press.
I would suggest that this is because – as has been pointed out to me quite forcefully on this very board – the left itself is far less monolithic than the right, and therefore less likely to agree across the board as to what it wants than is the right. Moreover, the press has attempted until rather recently to portray itself as unaligned and unbiased, so even though it may have been supportive of and in agreement with many of the left’s positions, it couldn’t very well be obvious about it.
And like I say, it’s often difficult to get everyone on the left to agree on what it wants in the first place. There are tons of things under the liberal umbrella, yet to embrace one would be to make the others feel excluded, and IMO this is likely why many on the left feel media bias doesn’t exist. It does, it’s just that the media can’t cover all liberal bases at once. The common thread though, is that the media has almost always been in the position of trying to make the right look bad.
I’ve heard it said that the definition of insanity is repeating an action over and over again and expecting a different result. See where this is going with regard to your Pit threads, Clothy?
Poor judgement, yes; but the media’s ridiculous behavior as a result has been way beyond the pale, and IMO it’s only going to further cement the impression of media bias against the right. I have never seen this kind of angry, accusatory and baiting type of behavior on the part of the media toward any but a Republican president.
While of course I would disagree with your characterization of my self-pitting, I nonetheless posted it because I had gone on a tangent of pretty much indiscriminate liberal-bashing that was all over the place and beyond the pale; and I wanted to acknowledge that and to apologize. By contrast, I believe that in this thread I’ve been pretty polite, conversational and pleasant…at least that’s been my frame of mind. I find it interesting that of the many cogent comments I feel I’ve made in this thread, the vast majority of responses haven’t addressed these points but have merely insulted me instead.
As the example showed, the media managed to be fair to the right by contorting like a pretzel. Similar behavior can be seen in the Medicare for medicines issue, or health care in general. In cases like that, the media pretends to be fair by showing the misleading points of the right vs. the points of the moderates and some times the points of the left as if they have the same value, no matter how misleading the ponits of the right are in cases like these.
And there you go again ignoring the love fest of the media with the administration on the way to the Iraq war.
It looks now like the media investigating if the points of the right are true is not being fair, or the mainstream conveniently has no time to check and just follow the “vox populy”… of the right wing lobbyists.
That the media are whores became evident when the subjects, that needed to be uncovered in the abuse of power that was the Plame scandal, were declared to be “sources”. This then caused the media to auto-spike the exposes that were needed. This only means that we have a media that self censors when the powers that be will be affected.
The shooting case of today is only the mainstream media going back to the non political “if it bleeds it leads” mode, I see this relentless reporting on Cheney as virtually having no impact on the policies of this administration.
