Glenn Greewald refers to neocon Bill Kristol as a “fear-mongering smear artist” along with VP Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney. I didn’t know he was an artist, but honestly, if Kristol is so bad in his canvas painting it actually frightens people, perhaps he should give it up.
On his blog yesterday, Greenwald compared Kristol and Cheney to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the notorious McCarthy hearings, in which alleged “communist sympathizers” such as Hollywood elites were being “blacklisted,” and in some cases criminally prosecuted. That was the origin of the term McCarthyism. Greewald noted how Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s was critical of McCarthy on Murrow’s TV show, and how CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s treatment of this issue is a “full-scale collapse from Murrow,” as far as journalistic integrity and objectivity are concerned.
….By contrast, Wolf Blitzer — receipient of an Edward R. Murrow award — sees such smear campaigns as nothing more than an “intense debate” to neutrally explore and excitingly promote. The last thing I would ordinarily do is watch a Wolf Blitzer broadcast, but I knew that this was going to be a heinously illustrative episode in modern political journalism — at best the vile McCarthyite campaign was going to be presented in the standard “each-side-says” format which defines modern journalistic ”objectivity” — but it was far worse than even I expected…..The two segments, from start to finish, were constructed based on the exact McCarthyite narrative Cheney and Kristol puked up, and although Blitzer did note that even some Bush officials found the ad to have gone “too far,” the entire 30 minutes of broadcast time — both when the story was repeatedly previewed and when it finally appeared — continuously reinforced the smears with both graphics and Blitzer’s words….
To me, this is just another example of what American journalism has become, as the news reporters, anchors and editors, and, yes the Roto-Writers of the New York Times, just do not comprehend the concept of objectivity. Many of them are shills for the Democrat Party, or just are products of government-run schools and have been brainwashed to worship the State (whether the State is led by Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives). When there are more “Tea Party” protests—and there will be—I hope that the state-shilling news media don’t, as Murrow said, “confuse dissent for disloyalty.”
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