Media Matters and Its Nanny

Ever since Hillary Clinton boasted at the Yearly Kos convention this summer that Media Matters was indeed her own brainchild, I've been subscribing to the group's daily, vital, emergency, vast-right-wing-conspiracy alerts. So for several months now, a half-dozen Media Matters email screeds have landed in my inbox every day on various topics, all claiming to have unearthed scandalous falsehoods in conservative news outlets, as well as the mainstream media.

Since I've actually listened to some of the radio talk being assailed, and read much of the journalism being analyzed for inaccuracies, I'm in a pretty good position to judge the merits of Media Matters' claims. And after subjecting myself to months of mountainous verbiage, I have concluded that perhaps never in history have so many good minds been so thoroughly wasted. Creating verbose mountains out of molehills has perhaps never paid so well. Yawn. Yawn.

And there I was last summer thinking that Hillary Clinton might have come up with something new and clever, right up there with Al Gore's invention of the internet. Alas, her invention isn't new at all. It is simply the recycling of what every school-age child recognizes right away as the hall-monitor mentality. Y'all know what I mean. It's the snippy little girl or boy put in charge of catching every gum-chewer, every line-breaker and every naughty-word-user within a ten-mile radius of the school yard. Give these types a little authority, it goes straight to their heads, and drives a principal into early-retirement burnout.

Media Matters has two special campaigns on-going against the most listened-to conservatives: Rush Limbaugh and Bill O-Reilly. On the Hall Monitors' website, they even have a search feature to help readers get the phone numbers for local radio stations, and encourage readers to call and complain. This is similar to conservative sites that offer readers the same service for elected representatives in government. Of course, hall monitors always prefer catching naughty-word-users to tackling real problems in government.

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To give you an idea of what passes for headline-worthy at Media Matters, Hillary's hall-monitor brigade caught Bill O'Reilly a couple of weeks ago in this misstep: "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly, who chided Dean over Book of Job misidentification, says Revelation "was written -- what? Five thousand years ago?" A paid writer expended well over 1000 words explaining that the Book of Revelation was written a little less than 2000 years ago. I'm personally shocked that in a 3-hour live radio broadcast, this was the only error the listener-monitor could find to transform into a written tattle.

But the real cake-taker from the Media Matters folks this year has been a whopping 36 separate postings of approximately 1000 words each, dealing with Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" on-air remark. The Media Matters hall monitors used approximately 36,000 words to lamely assert that Limbaugh was "unpatriotic." Perhaps never in history have so many meaningless words been used to propagate such an outright falsehood, one that was so easily debunked, even by this writer.

Source: The American Thinker

Commentary

I subscribe to the same email alerts as the author, and am a member of many Lefty Discussion Forums, and I can confirm that these guys and gals are cracked. It seems as if everyone suffers from the paranoia of the Coast to Coast listeners and the Idiot Ron Paul Supporters, and intersect in the ravings of Dennis "KuKu" Kucinich.