Monday January 08, 2007

TEACHING THE MSM A LESSON. Kerry photo funnies enjoyed by rightwing assholes (ha ha! Soljers stuk in irak hate Jon Cary!) shown to be bullshit. Ole Perfesser (via correspondent) says the real story is how that Cary -- I mean Kerry, ha ha -- has "special talents" for looking foolish.

Jamil Hussein, long derided by rightwing assholes as non-existent, is produced. The Ole Perfesser says the real story is that Media Matters listed Patterico among about a dozen other rightwing assholes.

Rightwing assholes flout Bush/Pelosi poll comparison which turns out, you guessed, to be misleading. (They tried something similar a few months back.) The Ole Perfesser turns it into a thought experiment: "I'm guessing, though, that these numbers would be getting a lot more press attention anyway if the party affiliations were reversed."

The knock I hear these guys constantly making on Main Stream Media is that the MSM's malfeasances, however small in the scheme of things, make all their stories hard to trust. They have a point. The MSM should work tirelessly and shamelessly, as the Perfesser does, to spin even obvious reversals into victories for their political affinity groups. Trying to actually report is difficult, and you can easily screw it up; but doing such work as the Perfesser does takes very little skill and there are no standards, apparently, against which to judge it. And there will always be a select group of people who will believe what you tell them, no matter what. And you never have to leave your basement!

Really, I don't know why our media isn't worse than it is, considering the current incentives.