However, now the NY Times has weighed in, backing popular opinion that the S Ct’s proceedings should be televised:

They would also allow voters to hold presidents accountable for the quality of justices they nominate.

Prompting us to ask upon what standards — the same ones that make Fox the most watched and ‘trusted’ name in ‘news‘?

Talking head and blogger Sarah Palin spoke out on Fox News saying that Alito’s “Wilson moment” was OK, and that Justice Alito was just “calling him out.” She based her careful judgment on her longstanding and intimate knowledge of Supreme Court protocol. Oh, wait.

In other deep layer of Palin analysis, she went on to discuss health care “mandation.” What’s “mandation” you ask? According to Dictionary.com it means “No dictionary results.” Strange…

And finally, she described the entire state of the union from President Obama as being like “a lecture.” And we all know how she feels about lectures. Maybe that’s why she went through five different colleges.

Palin was also basing her support of Justice Alito’s “calling out” the President on the history of the law and the Supreme Court,  upon her intimate knowledge of Supreme Court cases.  Where it appeared she couldn’t name a single Supreme Court case.

Note, however, that after the aforelinked debacle, Palin crammed for a crash course, and got to pimp some misleading political spin at the same time, all while Fox’s  Carl Cameron did his magician like “Fair and Balanced” act, craftily veiling his two minute TV rehabilitation commercial for her even while,  rather emphatically, getting in Palin (and Fox’s) anti mainstream media message at the end.

The mainstream media is poor, as Cameron, and Palin, subtly, and not so subtly, imply.  But not because it is unfair to Palin;  but because of quite the opposite.  As an example, the ideologically fervent, and almost always incorrect, misleading, or simply rhetoric stuffed Palin is treated with kid gloves relative to the facts.  And the media has done a better job covering Palin than many other things, in fact, and it still has not covered Palin correctly.

Notice that at the same time Cameron also renovated this snafu on Palin’s part as well — where Palin apparently could not name a single source of news she routinely read. Now, according to her and her fair and balanced mouthpiece Cameron, easily explained by how ”annoyed” she was at that same media, even though in the video itself (just linked to), Palin expresses her “great appreciation for” that very same media.

If Palin was thus acting sycophantic here by telling the world her “great appreciation for the same media” she would later tell her rehabilitator Cameron that she was so annoyed at she would not answer critical questions, wouldn’t it have made far more sense to have simply name some sources (if she really dutifully reads them) and some Supreme Court cases (if she really knew any) rather than come off as looking extremely uninformed when that was already a chief concern to begin with? And then make her point about media annoyance?

You betcha.  Palin didn’t because she froze. And she froze because, as evidenced by her constant misleading rhetoric, it is unlikely that she really had read very much of substance, or knew much about the Supreme Court or its decisions at all.

But that’s nothing that spinmeisters Fox and Palin (and now back, naturally on the “Fair and Balanced” station, together again), couldn’t cobble back together, as the link of  Cameron and Palin above, aptly illustrates.  (Just not to active hard core Democrats perhaps, who sometimes don’t seem to want to grasp that just because they think something is purely empty, doesn’t mean everyone else is not being somewhat influenced by it on some level, or that being the most watched cable “news” source is not just coincidental with the movement of this country that past ten plus years. But then it’s not clear that Democrats see the movement of this country the past ten years, either. )

As noted in the Anchorage Daily News piece just linked to, also consider Palin’s suggestion from her recent book  that the media is “worthless as a source of factual information anymore.”

This is sometimes true. But mainly because they will publish wildly misleading and incredibly ill informed pieces like this one by Palin herself, and play to the same propaganda as a legitimate “side’ to a ‘factual debate” that Palin repeatedly, and erroneously, promotes herself.

The irony is unbounded.

]]> http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/28/worth-repeating-palins-expertise/feed/ 2 http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/27/fox-is-tops/ http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/27/fox-is-tops/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:06:21 +0000 admin http://donkasauruspost.com/?p=503 Fox, most trusted name in news, largely because it’s ridiculously trusted by ideological conservatives.

It couldn’t possibly be because this heavily ideological “news” station, with the thinnest of obscuring veneers of “fair and balanced” over its persistent and cleverly veiled advocacy, tells some people what they want to hear (while convincing them of how fair and balanced they are being), could it?

Let’s look at an example: Fox was obsessed with ACORN.  So much so that it actually derided other news stations, who were already over covering allegations against this voter advocacy and neighborhood outreach organization,  for not giving covering this even more.

Once ACORN was essentially absolved, however, of voter fraud for the past half decade –

A new report on the community group Acorn by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has found no evidence of fraudulent voting or of violations of federal financing rules by the group in the past five years.

–big news given the neat constant coverage and reiterations of various allegations and accusations of voter fraud against, Fox suddenly clammed up:

And how many times did America hear how this group, which supported Obama, had engaged in fraudulent voting or violated federal financing rules at the same time?

How many times will this “error of the year” be corrected? With near round the clock coverage of it just like Fox seemed to insist the “ACORN scandal” required?

Not exactly.  A google search of the terms ”ACORN,” and “fraud,” with either “voter,” or “voting” within the domain of foxnews.com yielded a plethora of results.  But in the first few dozen (we got tired of checking after that) there was no mention of the news above that ACORN had been cleared for the past half decade (changing “fraud” to “fraudulent” did not change this fact).

In fact, in the first few dozen results, none were even in the last two weeks or so, while November, October, and September found all kinds of ACORN and fraud stories on Fox.  It seems like, once the “story of the year” brought some news that didn’t suit “fair and balanced” Fox’s ideology, it went from being a ’story of the year” to pretty much off of Fox’s radar.

Now it seems a similar pattern is emerging with regard to the famous ACORN under cover sleuths, now that they have been caught, in a little “mini watergate,”  apparently trying to bug Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office – a pretty serious offense.

While a bit unsettling that Americans (or anybody) would pose as repairmen to gain access to a Senator’s office for the apparent purpose of espionage, we’re not all that sure that this is all that huge a story.  But given that Fox obsessed over the ACORN “pimp” scandal that this same person helped create, more attention certainly was warranted.