The Exact Opposite of Truth

[Geee]

American Spectator:

TAMPA, Florida -- The Republican Party has spared no expense to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have come here to write dishonest stories aimed at preventing the GOP from winning this year's election.

If you've been following major media coverage of the Republican National Convention, you know that the party's presidential candidate is Todd Akin, who will campaign this fall on a platform of undiluted hatred and evil, with the able assistance of his running mate, Martin Bormann Jr. The Akin-Bormann ticket was personally selected by RNC Chairman Rush Limbaugh and endorsed by Karl Rove after consultation with a secretive cabal of right-wing Mormon billionaires. The Republican delegates who are assembling this week in Tampa are mere dupes hired by the Koch brothers to provide the superficial appearance of a "political convention" debating a platform and nominating candidates.

Such is the narrative subtext of most of the GOP convention coverage, which is provided by a political press corps that is overwhelmingly composed of people who would never vote for any Republican under any imaginable circumstance. It has been estimated, based on data analyzed by the conservative non-profit Media Research Center, that Democrats outnumber Republicans among journalists by a ratio of at least 7-to-1, perhaps even more than 10-to-1. This lopsided partisanship has consequences that are, on the one hand, blindingly obvious to Republicans and yet somehow, on the other hand, utterly invisible to most of those inside the news industry.

Most journalists never notice liberal bias for the same reason that fish don't notice water -- it is all around them, it is all they've ever known, and they take it for granted. And just as the fish out of water flops around desperately at the life-threatening loss of its accustomed environment, most journalists react with a frantic horror at reporting that lacks the partisan slant which is understood as "objectivity" by members of the press corps. Only when one's mind is trapped inside that weird worldview, for example, is it possible to take Chris Matthews seriously.

In case you didn't realize it, the only claim Matthews has to being a journalist is that he is a partisan Democrat. Matthews never worked a day as a reporter, never covered a city council meeting or a homecoming parade. After evading the Vietnam-era military draft by enrolling in the Peace Corps, Matthews moved to Washington and worked on the staff of various congressional Democrats before unsuccessfully running for Congress as a Democrat, later joining the White House staff as a speechwriter for Democrat Jimmy Carter, then spending the Reagan years as a top aide to Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Somehow, this ultra-political background as a partisan operative qualified Matthews for the job of Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle. Such is the biography of the man who has been employed for the past 15 years as a "journalist" by NBC, hosting his own show on the network's little-watched MSNBC cable franchise while appearing regularly on the broadcast network during coverage of major political events.