I had a bit of a revelation in the last few days about punditry and how the right wing can get away with as much as it does. I was reminded of this in reading another diary entry about O'reilley's attempted theft of Joe Biden's thinking on Gitmo. It comes down to a simple matter: integrity.
Ultimately what gets play in the press is controversey. For there to be controversey, there must be conflict. Something must be said that somehow conflicts with what other people are saying or preconceived notions of the reality we occasionally visit in this country. If there is no controversey, there is no news.
When Bill O'reilley does a hatchet job on a Senator's idea for how to deal with Gitmo, it's not news. Why? No controversey. We all know that O'reilley is a lying wind bag with no sense of integrity. So when he does something like this, most of the press looks at it and goes, "yeah, but it's O'reilley, so what did you expect?"
Now, when Dean comes out and says that Republicans are mostly white christians (true), or Durbin suggests that the kind of actions at Gitmo sound like something out of a Nazi prison camp (also true), the press goes ape shit. Why? Because these guys don't say things like that and the right wing made a point of beating their war drums over it. The press isn't used to hearing Democrats say things like that. There's a story there because that kind of bold speech isn't expected out of these people.
When Santorum says that people wanting to use the filibuster are Nazis it's not news. When Durbin says that torture is the sort of thing Nazis do it is news. Why? Because we all know Santorum's a wacko, but we all have some respect for Durbin, so the bar is higher for him.
Applying this further, we see the Downing Street Memo as a prime example of how this plays out. We're told that Bush administration didn't get bad intelligence, but rather that they were reading the intelligence to favor a predetermined course of action. This is a huge, impeachment worthy, revelation and it's originally met with silence. Why? Because the press knows that Bush is a deceptive liar and that this was never about WMD's. I wish they'd figured that out before we sent troops, but eventually they did figure it out. So it seems to them that it's old news.
