"It’s a hard thing to be honest about and I think we’ve had a good discussion on this for everybody," Chris Matthews said today on "The Chris Matthews Show."
Maybe honest but a good discussion, no.
Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars posted a transcript of the discussion Chris Matthews led Sunday morning pertaining to National Public Radio in light of the edited video created by criminal offender James O'Keefe. The participants included Kelly O'Donnell of NBC, Katty Kay of the BBC, David Ignatius of The Washington Post, and The New York Times' David Brooks. Yet, no one, Belle points out, saw fit to mention that the scam was hatched by O'Keefe. O'Keefe is the fellow who fabricated the ACORN video; tried to tamper with the phone lines in Senator Mary Landrieu's office; attempted to lure CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat and seduce her to ruin CNN's reputation; and attended a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists.
There has been severely limited analysis of the video produced by O'Keefe, especially as it is playing a prominent role in GOP efforts to defund NPR. Oddly, one of the few critics has been that of Glenn Becks's website, The Blaze. There, Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker reported that the site's video analyst, Pam Key, evaluated the audio and video and found considerable editing. Baker broke it down into five sections which he termed: Muslim Brotherhood connections; Does Ron Schiller react to Sharia misstatement with amusement?; How does Schiller describe Republicans?; Are liberals more educated than conservatives?; Does NPR need federal funding?
My favorite video clip comparison (below) appears to demonstrate that the "racist, gun toting" description of tea party members came not initially from Ron Schiller (though he apparently agrees with it) but from two Republicans, an ambassador and a big donor.
It might behoove someone in the "liberal" media to delve around a little to determine who these two Republicans are. It's highly likely an investigative reporter would find that the views of these two do not represent an outlier, that many mainstream conservative members of the Republican party find the tea party outrageous. And we might find quite a few Repub politicians intimidated by a movement that, far from its portrayal by the mainstream media as populist, is little more than a subsidiary of corporate America.
This would be very, very bad for the GOP, which would anger some people. Guys like Chris Matthews and David Ignatius, generally enamored of Barack Obama, are widely misunderstood. Their preferences are for Barack Obama, the man, rather than for liberal policies. (Matthews especially peddles the myth that Obama is personally beloved while his policies are unpopular.) And protecting, consciously or unconsciously, the Republican Party is one way they can avoid- they hope- being smeared by conservatives as part of that evil "liberal media."
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