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Townhall...
The Media on
Wisconsin? A Bad Joke
By Brent Bozell
The battle in Madison, Wis., between new Gov. Scott Walker and the
public-sector union hacks offers an amazing study in journalistic
double standards. The same national media that have spent the last two
years drawing devil’s horns and Klan hoods on the tea party protesters
have switched sides with lightning speed. In the Wisconsin protesters,
they find sweetness and light, “hope and change.”
From her Sunday soapbox, ABC host Christiane Amanpour snobbishly
deplored the tea party as not conservative but as “extreme” last fall.
In a special “town hall” episode of her show on the ground zero mosque
debate, she accused an incredulous Gary Bauer of encouraging vandalism
at a Tennessee mosque because somehow Christian rhetoric is offensive.
The accusation itself was offensive because it was entirely baseless.
Yet in Wisconsin, the exact opposite happened. Amanpour took the
extreme, vicious and wholly offensive signs comparing Gov. Walker to
Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and embraced them as geopolitically
accurate: “People power making history: A revolt in the Midwest and a
revolution sweeping across the Middle East.” She touted how “populist
frustration is boiling over this week.”
This is politically perverse. Last November, Wisconsin registered one
of the most dramatic rejections of the Democrats in the entire country.
Sen. Russ Feingold, once considered a shoo-in for re-election, was not
only defeated; he was crushed by 100,000 votes. Polls convinced
Democrat Gov. Jim Doyle to avoid running for re-election, paving the
way for Walker. And the GOP swept into both houses, defeating both
state Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker and Assembly Speaker Mike
Sheridan at the polls. The Republican Party was so successful that
Wisconsin GOP leader Reince Priebus was elected as the national party
chairman.
What incredible gall for the national media to try to transform
Wisconsin from conservative juggernaut to Egyptian dictatorship in a
heartbeat. Their political imagination (or delusion) is just
staggering, completely ignoring the election returns. Liberals were
crushed by the voters, and now they dare to put themselves in the
“people power” category? This is reality turned upside down.
But it isn’t just electoral reality that’s been mangled. Where, oh
where, are the media lectures on civility now? The same media that
roundly and repeatedly condemned Sarah Palin for daring to put cross
hairs on a congressional district -- not on congressional faces, but on
counties -- now have absolutely nothing to say as protester signs put
Gov. Walker’s face in cross hairs with the words: “Don’t Retreat,
Reload: Repeal Walker.” Another held a sign saying, “Political Death to
Tyrants.”
The same media that went into desk-pounding rage about LaRouche-wacko
signs putting a Hitler moustache on Obama calmly refused to discuss
signs where Gov. Walker was compared to Mubarak and Adolf Hitler. He
was “Scott Stalin” and “Midwest Mussolini.” Signs accused Walker of
“rape,” called him a profanity describing incest, and said he
“terrorizes families.” Any incivility there?
In a devastating video, the Wisconsin Republican Party put some of
these images next to arrogant leftists insisting only conservatives do
this kind of thing. “Violent political rhetoric and the threat of
political violence comes almost exclusively from the right,” declared
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson on MSNBC. “Left-wingers don’t
talk that way,” boasted Bill Maher to Jay Leno.
This was an ideal opportunity for the news media to deplore the
insults, but the “civility police” were on vacation. They not only
failed, but in their failure they proved they only pretend to care
about civility to protect the public image of their friends.
Not every liberal is blind to this. Washington Post editorialist
Charles Lane disagreed with his colleague Eugene Robinson: “This is
hypocrisy on an epic scale. I can’t think of a more overwhelming
refutation of the claim that incivility is the unique province of the
American right.” This was only online, not in the paper. On Time’s
“Swampland” blog, columnist Joe Klein denounced the “disgusting mimicry
of some tea party members’ inflammatory linkage between Obama and the
evil dictators of history.” But these men were a tiny sliver of dissent
from the media’s “pro-union” party line.
It is weeks like this where the liberal media fail to understand what a
bad joke they’ve become. Their offerings are not “news,” but crude spin
and blatant propaganda.
There’s only one comfort. At least, we’ve been spared from the ugly
sight of how aggressively Keith Olbermann might have embodied that
“hypocrisy on an epic scale.” On the other hand, it appears that
Christiane Amanpour aspires to that mantle and is quickly earning Mr.
Olbermann’s level of credibility.
Read it at Townhall
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