I don't usually watch MSNBC's Scarborough Country, but I passed it while channel surfing and saw that Rachel Sklar was a guest, so I decided to see what she had to say. The segment was called "Does 'Fake News' Help The Democrats," and the question was: "Did the popularity of "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" help the Democrats in the midterm elections?"
Scarborough's guests were Mathew Felling, from "The Center for Media and Public Affairs," and Rachel Sklar, with "The Huffington Post." He opened the segment by asking, "Who should Democrats thank for their triumph?" Scarborough noted that young voters turned out in record numbers, "their highest number in several decades and many of them voted Democrat."
Joe showed a quote from the LA Times that said, "The biggest winner this election season has risen from the parted waters - and it's not Nancy Pelosi. It's Stephen Colbert ... every incumbent candidate he interviewed in his notorious 'Better Know a District' segment was reelected."
Rachel Sklar said that Stewart and Colbert did was to take an unfiltered look at the republican spin machine - they blatently went in there and called them on it with side-by-side clips showing their obfuscations and half truths.
Mathew Felling said that all Republican spin was unspun and unraveled over August, September, and October. He said (may be paraphrased a bit):
"We had Abramoff then we had Iraq finally get to the boiling point; nobody was going to fall for the "stay the course audible" in the middle of October. And then there's the thing sending IMs to pages and talking about penis length. Republicans did the job for them ... You Tube slayed the beast, the GOP. Today we had Montana and Virginia offically go to the left side. What happened in Montana? We had Conrad Burns on You tube, probably viewed a couple of hundred thousand times, about the Guatamalan guy who takes care of his house. And then we had macaca endlessly throughout August, throughout September that took Allen from 30 points ahead, 25, to even.
Scarborough showed clips from the Comedy Central Election special Tuesday night, which had Katherine Harris being "deflated" and Rick Santorum "raptured."
Rachel Sklar pointed out that the audience knew who Rick Santorum was. She said that they understood the issues- they knew what was going on and they were an educated audience
Scarborough closed the segment by saying:
... If you want to look at close races, Two races that made the biggest difference - the race in Montana and the race in Virginia. The loss of Conrad burns, the guy lost by what - two, three thousand votes, and then you have the race in Virginia where you have Allen who lost by a couple thousand votes. That could be some young people, lets just say - that watch the Daily Show, that watch the Colbert Report, that go to You Tube, that goes to Daily Kos, that goes to The Huffington Post. It's new media, I believe, that certainly had an impact on one or two races and that made the difference between Republicans and Democrats controlling the Senate.
So there you have it. Joe Scarborough thinks that dKos was a substantial part of the reason that the Senate will be controlled by Democrats for the next two years. Someday we may get some credit from the rest of corporate media, and not be viewed as an irrelevant fringe.