Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Sneaky Journalism 101

So deep in the tank of Democrat politics are the liberal old-guard media, they've stooped to inventing stories, sources and factoids out of whole cloth.

No, it's not a new thing. But it's getting worse by the day as modern scribblers throw out fairness, thoroughness, honesty and all other standards of professionalism in their passion to force "enlightened progress" on the rest of us.

Here are just a couple of examples from my weekend web browsing of Power Line showing how Democrat politicos and their reporter pals deliberately (and shamefully) mislead the public.

The first comes from this post (via the original source, Patterico's Pontifications) about the Houston Chronicle's rank amateurism (or something much worse) in a false report it gave of a town hall meeting of the infamous Texas Congresswoman Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee:

...During the event, one Roxana Mayer presented herself as a physician supporting Obamacare. "I don't know what there is in the bill that creates such panic," she said. According to "Dr." Mayer, the health care system is broken and in need of Obama's cure. In a Houston Chronicle photograph whose caption described Mayer as a pediatric primary care physician, Lee hugged "Dr." Mayer. Very touching.


Mayer, however, is an impostor. She is not a physician, but rather a graduate student in social work and a former Obama delegate to last year's Democratic national convention. She was also an Organizing For America "host" during the Texas primary last year. The Houston Chronicle knew Mayer was an Obama delegate at the time it published the photo, but omitted the information.


The second item is here, giving a telling example of how journalists regularly portray persons they quote in their stories as being "randomly" and "unbiasedly" selected when, in truth, the reporters have carefully chosen them beforehand in order to present a particular point of view. Then these people are sneakily presented as just "men in the street." Bad form, indeed.