INFO Wars: Sarah Palin, John Edwards Get Very Different MSM Coverage – Page Two

The intensity of media inquiries hit a new level after an anonymous blogger on the liberal Web site Daily Kos last weekend charged that McCain’s running mate is actually the grandmother of Trig Palin, the 4-month-old baby born with Down syndrome, and that the real mother is her daughter, 17-year-old Bristol Palin. That led to mainstream media inquiries, which prompted the McCain camp to disclose in a statement Monday that Bristol is five months pregnant and plans to have the baby and marry the teenage father.

Only this time, KOS isn’t running from the deed.

“The site’s founder, Markos Moulitsas, said he did not know the contributor’s identity but thought that the admittedly “weird” pregnancy questions were a legitimate line of inquiry that he should not suppress.”

What a difference a month makes for Comrade Markos. Last month, Lee Stranahan posted a series of DailyKOS pieces on Edwards and promptly got booted from the site for his “line of inquiry”. [John Edwards Scandal: DailyKOS Bans Stranahan for Writing About Edwards].

How legitimate was Stranahan’s “line of inquiry”? Edwards’ August 8 admission of his “mistake”–he never mentioned the word “affair”–rendered the question rhetorical. Except to Stranahan, who remains banned from the KOS’ Progressive Paradise.

Moulitsas, proud progressive that he is, denied knowing who Stranahan was when asked.

I e-mailed Moulitsas to ask about the ban. “I don’t know who Lee Streehan [sic] is,” he replied, “but my community decided they didn’t like him, and they’re usually right about such things.” (On his blog, however, Stranahan points out that Moulitsas called one of his videos “the best parody video of 2007.”)

Pencil in DailyKOS as one more place you don’t get news–even if one of their “community” writes about it. Outside of right bloggers mining the rich vein of KOS Diaries for nutroots’ quotes, who to the right of Raoul Castro reads DailyKOS anyway?

However, don’t tell the New York Times that. The NY Times has a dream: to become the national, print version of the DailyKOS.

“All the News Fit for the Nutroots”

The plan is succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of whatever financial Einstein dreamed up that strategy. As we reported earlier, the “NY Times is now the fourth-largest newspaper in New York City”. [NY Times Dishes Palin Dirt; Loses 30,000 More Subscribers]

The NY Times, however, is losing more readers than it can replace–and don’t think stockholders have taken notice.

Kurtz lumps in members of the MSM with “bloggers” when convenient. As in, “Last year, the New Republic retracted a soldier’s dispatch on petty wartime cruelty in Iraq, and National Review Online acknowledged that two blog postings by a former Marine about military movements in Lebanon were misleading.”

The New Republic is part of the blogosphere? Better clue them in, Howie–they might quote you. Again, the New Republic didn’t retract anything until called on its fictions by the blogosphere and The Weekly Standard.

Kurtz did get one thing right: the MSM are gatekeepers no longer.

Major newspapers, magazines and networks no longer play their traditional gatekeeper role in the digital age, as was evident during the eight-month period when the National Enquirer was charging former senator John Edwards with fathering an out-of-wedlock baby. Most [all] national news outlets did not report the allegations until last month, when Edwards acknowledged an affair with a former campaign aide but denied being her child’s father.

Kurtz sees it all as just politics: “Denouncing the news media as biased also plays well with many Republican voters.”

The LA Times concurs: “”Delegates to the Republican National Convention whirled in their seats en masse and called out from the floor: ‘Tell the truth! Tell the truth!’ The chants and finger-wagging were directed toward the sky boxes. Their target: the television networks and the rest of the ‘liberal mainstream media.’”

Perhaps it’s because Republicans have been the traditional whipping boy of Big Media? But Hillary Clinton became the MSM whipping girl during the Democrat primaries and her supporters still haven’t forgotten their candidate’s treatment from a “fair and balanced” press.

National Review notices.

“The New York Times’s webpage on Tuesday led with no fewer than three stories about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. CNN has tried to exploit Miss Palin as a laboratory specimen for a high-profile examination of sex-education. MSNBC and the Huffington Post are titillating viewers with exposes on Miss Palin’s boyfriend. Slate, owned by the Washington Post, is running a ‘Name Bristol Palin’s Baby’ contest. US Weekly has ‘Babies, Lies, and Scandal’ on its cover.

Howard Kurtz calls it “The War Against the Press”. We call it the “Info Wars” and they’ve been fought for the last ten years on the digital front of the Internet.

Big Media thinks the problem is the messenger, not their message. The MSM has its own Internet blogs, in a an attempt to fight back and stem declining circulation, viewership, ad revenues and stock prices.

But few are fooled by the MSM blogs. As Victor at GameSpot Forums says:

“You can dress a Turd in a Tuxedo, But at the end of the day, it’s still a Turd.”

by Mondoreb

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Tags: affair, bias, Blogosphere, cover-up, info wars. New York Times, John Edwards, Mainstream Media, MSM, Sarah Palin, scandal