Who Needs Air America?

Found this little gem this evening at http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/18/leakprobe.ap/index.html

When Air America was started it’s proponents claimed that something was needed to “answer Fox News and Talk Radio”. Fox news never goes this far.

The level of close-up and the unflattering nature of the picture coupled with the heading tells you all you need to know, but this is SUPPOSED to be “news”, not editorial. I’ve written on this topic before, but this is so completely over the top that it is hard to imagine even talk radio attempting to put out this level of mis-statement, even if they DID label it as “editorial”. It is at the same level of “fact” as the Rather manufactured documents. Some basic points:

• The whole statement of “slash and burn assault” is completely ridiculous. Want to compare it with the Clinton administration and James Carvelle coming out and saying of Paula Jones; “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park and you never know what you will dredge up”? How about finding out and disclosing a 30 year old affair by Congressman Henry Hyde? The list was constant and endless. The previous administration was completely “slash and burn” and had two guys … Carvelle and Begala dedicated to doing just that. The MSM LOVED it!
• It was well known in Washington that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, and she hadn’t been undercover for 6 years. There never was anything to leak, and there wasn’t any damage caused. The whole “damage” is press created. Rather than create false documents this is a “create a false story in broad daylight” … since one set of people only follow the MSM we can tell them whatever we want and make it a “real story”.
• The whole “faulty British Intelligence” discussion was investigated by an independent prosecutor in Britain, and the head of the BBC that brought up the “sexed up” claim was the one forced to resign.

It seems there is currently no limit to the level of malfeasance of the MSM. If a Democrat was forced to submit to these sorts of scrutiny, bombing Chinese embassies, making deals with North Korea to give them nuclear reactors and fuel, donor maintenance events, no controlling legal authority, and perjury would all have been nasty problems. For a Republican administration all that is needed is to make up a problem out of whole cloth and keep reporting on it. There is a good reason why reasonable Americans that would rather not waste their time reading information that is less accurate than the National Enquirer have just decided to just ignore the MSM entirely and go elsewhere.