Steve Gillard's News Blog: Partisan Hacks

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Ah, let's talk about blogging ethics for a moment. When you give me money, I hope it's because there's some sense of integrity involved in this, that I admit my errors about things where I am wrong and not try to defend them, like.....

"Citizen journalists"? Try partisan hacks
Right-wing bloggers shrieked that the GOP Schiavo memo was a "liberal media" fraud. Now that they've been proven wrong, are they apologizing? Why, no!

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By Eric Boehlert

Led into battle by Power Line, which posted over a dozen conspiratorial-sounding posts about the memo, bloggers seized on its misspellings as proof of deception and, relying on echo chamber tips from GOP staffers on the Hill, became more and more sure in their pursuit. "Is This the Biggest Hoax Since the Sixty Minutes Story?" a March 21 Power Line headline asked. Then, on March 30, came "Talking Points Story Goes Up in Smoke." (Time magazine honored Power Line as Blog of the Year in 2004 for its role in the CBS scandal.)

But then, late on Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that the author of the memo had stepped forward: An aide to Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida admitted he had written it. Now the facts are clear: The memo is real, and it was written by the Republican side and distributed by the Republican side, making it a GOP talking-points memo.

The irony is that the memo wasn't all that significant to the larger Schiavo story. Conservatives magnified its importance by suggesting that it had led Americans to conclude that Republicans were playing politics with the right-to-die case. (A vast majority of Americans, including self-identified conservatives, told pollsters the administration was wrong to get involved in the Schiavo case.) But in fact the existence of the memo was not that widely reported -- no more widely reported than Rep. Tom DeLay's comment to conservative activists that Terri was a gift from God for their cause, nor than that conservative Christian groups were using the story for fundraising activities.
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And here's Power Line as it hatched the nonstory: The memo "does not sound like something written by a conservative; it sounds like a liberal fantasy of how conservatives talk. What conservative would write that the case of a woman condemned to death by starvation is 'a great political issue'? Maybe such a person exists, but I doubt it."

On Wednesday, the right-wing Washington Times demonstrated its unique brand of naiveté when it further hyped the episode by reporting that it had contacted all the Republicans in the Senate and none had admitted they were behind the talking-points memo. (Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, insisted the memo was "an invention of the press.") Does the Times really think that partisan, and as it turns out erroneous, denials qualify as news?

Aside from their sloppy speculation, the episode also revealed the cloud of arrogance that hangs around bloggers from the CBS Memogate crowd. Indeed, this week right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, busy peddling another false story -- which claims that Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographers who captured blood-curdling images from Iraq had ties to terrorists -- demanded to know why Pulitzer judges hadn't met with bloggers to discuss their conspiracy theory before handing out their prestigious prize. Right-wing site Little Green Footballs thundered: "The media establishment puts their thumb in the eye of the blogosphere, awarding a Pulitzer Prize for photography to the Associated Press's anonymous and very possibly staged photographs of terrorists committing murder on Baghdad's Haifa Street" (emphasis added)

Now, this was bullshit. No Dem would be as stupid, given the servile nature of our media, to write something like that to hear about it for two weeks on Fox. They would be lucky to escape a special prosecutor.

But then, common sense is not their ally. Party loyalty is. They will defend the GOP until they can do so no longer. What kind of integrity is that?