Friday, November 03, 2006

Stumping for the Dems on Today

It's just a few days away from one of the most important elections in recent US history and it's beginning to look like the Republicans just might hold onto enough seats to keep the House and Senate. That doesn't seem to be going over too well with NBC, or more particularly The Today Show.

Just moments ago they had back to back segments that looked like they were written directly by James Carville and definitely not by unbiased news people.

The first was Matt Lauer not only pushing the John Kerry excuse about his remarks being only a badly worded joke, without showing the original speech I might add, but actually attacking the President for daring to draw attention to the very public statement by the senior Democratic Representative. He actually got animated when Andy Card brought up the fact that Kerry's own admitted personal history had involved actions that have been offensive to the troops. It was incredible. He just kept pushing Card to fall into line with the joke meme as if no reasonable person could believe that a Democrat could possibly ever say anything mean about the military, all previous statements by Murtha, Durbin, Pelosi and Kerry himself being to the contrary.

Most telling of all, Lauer actually got angry at the Democrats who dared called for an apology from Kerry instead of standing behind him. Even if you thought it was a botched joke, you have to be hard left to not think Sen. Kerry should have immediately apologized to the men and women of the military who were offended by his remarks. I like Matt generally, but in this 'interview' with Card, he was flashing his liberal credentials for all the world to see.

The second segment was just tabloid journalism at it worse. The story centered on Pastor Ted Haggard, leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, resigning his position over allegations he had sex with a male prostitute, a very legitimate story I might add, but the way they covered it went above and beyond and strongly into the realm of smear. In their own piece they admit the story is currently only a he said he said issue with some audio tapes that have yet to be reviewed but they present it in such accusatory tones that they treat the charge as fact with absolutely no evidence to back it up. They even work overtime to show the connection to the President for no apparent reason (not quite sure what Bush has to do with a potential sex scandal for a evangelical pastor but hey, every stone counts I guess).

They even drag in Keith Morrison to report the story. Keith may be a Canadian, but I have never liked his reporting style. If you review his transcripts everything would appear just fine, but in real life he often changes the inflection of his voice when making statements or asking questions to strongly imply his belief as to the veracity of the claims, and he does this in spades during the Haggard story. Every possible defense is treated with a questioning upturn in his voice while the accusations, once again currently without any supporting evidence, are made to sound like indisputable facts. It's the same reason I've never been able to watch him on Dateline even if he is covering a worthwhile story, which this Haggard story may just turn out to be.

To be fair to Keith, he's not the only investigative reporter that does this, John Stossel over at ABC often does the same inflection trick and it annoys me just as much over there.

It's just incredible to see how the coverage of anything that may hurt the Conservative side of the political spectrum is covered on America's most watched morning news broadcast.

1 Comments:

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November 14, 2022 9:54 p.m.  

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