Peas In A Pod
by digby
This op-ed by Howell Raines, former editor of the NY Times, in which he wonders why the media refuse to confront their rivals FOX news as the propaganda arm it is has been getting a lot of circulation. Setting aside the sheer chutzpah of the man who refused to apologize for being Newtie's little lapdog during the Whitewater scandal (they didn't need FOX on those days because they had the paper of record doing their dirty work for them), the answer to his question seems fairly obvious to me. The rest of the press doesn't want to come down too hard on FOX because in a shrinking journalistic universe there is a diminishing number of places to work these days.
And anyway, what makes Raines think that the NY Times has a problem with Fox in the first place? Judging from the ACORN scandal, they don't see much of a problem even with a totally phony group of liars like Breitbart?
Building on the work done by Bradblog and Media Matters on this issue, FAIR came out with an advisory last week which should make the Times cringe with embarrassment. Here's just the most recent evidence of their journalistic malpractice on this story:
--On March 2, 2010, under the headline, "ACORN's Advice to Fake Pimp Was No Crime, Prosecutor Says, "the Times reported: "The ACORN employees in Brooklyn who were captured on a hidden camera seeming to offer conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute creative advice on how to get a mortgage have been cleared of wrongdoing by the Brooklyn district attorney's office."
But the story the Times continues to tell is wildly misleading, as a review of the publicly available transcripts of his visit (BigGovernment.com) makes clear. O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a "pimp," and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not "tax evasion"). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.
In the case recounted in the March 2 Times story, the transcripts show that O'Keefe did not portray himself as a pimp to the ACORN workers in Brooklyn, but told them that he was trying to help his prostitute girlfriend. In part of the exchange, O'Keefe and his accomplice seem to be telling ACORN staffers that they are attempting to buy a house to protect child prostitutes from an abusive pimp.
Throughout the months the Times covered the story, it made a major mistake: believing that Internet videos produced by right-wing activists were to be trusted uncritically, rather than approached with the skepticism due to anything you'd come across on the Web. O'Keefe and the Web publisher Andrew Breitbart refused to make unedited copies of the videotape public, and with good reason: A more complete viewing, as the transcripts show, would produce a much different impression.
This isn't just about O'Keefe and Giles misrepresenting how they looked when they went into those offices. They misrepresented what they said and what the ACORN workers were responding to. There's no excuse for the Times refusing to acknowledge this and at this point, the Times' refusal to acknowledge how badly they handled this story is a scandal in itself.
Perhaps we should begin to ask whether or not the press isn't questioning the right wing noise machine's propaganda simply because they agree with it?
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