MSM: Like blackbirds landing on a telephone pole

The Seattle PI columnist, Joel Connelly (the dean of Seattle political commentators), today called on his colleagues in the media to stop parroting the lies and half truths about Barack Obama coming out of the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

A gnarled hand grasped my wrist as I was leaving a Bill Clinton speech in Pahrump, Nev., and pressed into my hand a picture of Sen. Barack Obama with fellow candidates.
"They say Obama refuses to salute the flag," said the lady, a Puget Sounder transplanted to the high desert.
Back in Las Vegas, I checked out the picture. The refuse-to-salute claim was a fraud. True, Obama was standing with his hands clasped at an Iowa meeting, while Bill Richardson put his hand over his heart. But the photo was taken during the singing of the national anthem.
"We pick a presidential candidate, and then we pick on him," Adlai Stevenson, another eloquent candidate from Illinois, once observed.

More below.

As Connelly points out, this is nothing new, but it’s pertinent, I think, that Stevenson was actually the nominee by the time he made his exasperated comment.  Other than the John Birchers and assorted nuts (who weren’t too fond of Ike, either), no one impugned Stevenson’s patriotism or religious beliefs.  We’ve grown used to such attacks from the mainstreamed attack dogs of the right.  What’s new here is that these innuendos are coming from the campaign of a supposed fellow Democrat.  These corrosive lies are being heaped on our likely candidate in the fall by a supposed fellow Democrat.

Howard Wolfson, the Frank Nitti of the Clinton campaign, has likened Obama to Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Someone allegedly in Clinton's campaign leaked to the Drudge Report a picture of Obama, in Kenya, clad in an ill-fitting turban.
Wolfson has sought to fan flames of Obama's relationship to indicted political fundraiser Tony Rezko -- "What is the nature of the relationship?" -- while ignoring a picture of Hillary Clinton beaming as she shook hands with the Chicago real estate developer.

But Connelly quite rightly focuses on what amounts to slander from the MSM.

Attacks on Obama have grown more sinister, however, and centered on his religion.
Crude right-wing smears started it. "Who is Barak (sic) Obama?" asked one broadside. It reported that Obama as a boy "attended a MUSLIM" school in Indonesia, and stated: "Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim."
The Fox News Channel picked up and reported the "Muslim school" rumor. A CNN reporter went to the school and found it to be secular, with students of diverse faith traditions.

This is something new, something vile.  I would have thought that every gnarled, ingrown gremlin in America’s psychic closet had been revealed over the past eight years.  Again, I am wrong.

Connelly’s column represents a brave effort to swim upstream against the MSM conventional "wisdom" and should be taken as a whole.  Read it and give praise.  

(I am at work, so I'll only be able to check in occasionally.  I just wanted to share the column with you all!)

•  There used to be a time when members of the media

  felt like they had a responsibility to not just repeat what public figures said, but to call bullshit on them if they were lying.

  It was known as "Journalism" (pronounced Jowrn-a-lizm).

  These proud members considered themselves the watchdog of our government and they in turn were known as the fourth estate.

  Unfortunately after 200 years of the practice, the fourth estate is bankrupt.

  by Skulnick on Mon Mar 10, 2008 at 11:04:37 AM PDT

•  Vile lies

  These "Gremlins" will not go away, and they can't be defeated with verbal denials. People need to see Obama with his hand over his heart, and at church, and with his family. TV ads of him exciting crowds doesn't change the false ideas that have been planted in voters' minds. There have to be better images that create the dissonance needed to dispel the lies.

  by schoales on Mon Mar 10, 2008 at 11:08:15 AM PDT

•  Thanks for reading! eom

  by chuckvw on Mon Mar 10, 2008 at 11:14:22 AM PDT

•  I once challenged a tv personality (my terms)

  about his inability to follow the basic rules of journalism via email.

  He wrote back that he was not a journalist, he was a "pundit", and free to give his personal opinion.  He emphasized that he had no responsibility to fact check his "opinions".

  by Blogvirgin on Mon Mar 10, 2008 at 07:51:35 PM PDT