“a love so politically damaging, they dare not speak its name…” click to embiggen
I enjoy 99.9% of what Patterico writes, but I am getting a lot of mileage from one of his posts.
I just read the Harvard Finds Leftward Media Tilt poll and everyone has covered the “man bites dog” aspect of it.
However, I was struck by one short factoid in particular.
Ok, here are two blockquotes. There is a paradox that the two combine to highlight. See if you can spot this cognitive dissidence:
First, here is Patterico’s post in which he presents LAT editor Matt Welch, “smart” enough to spot it, “honest” enough to report it, and “plugged in” enough to know about it, and yet he has never heard a breath about the presidential sex scandal rumor, so therefore said rumor must be false. And there is an added bit that alludes to the integrity of Mr. Welch’s reputation:
This morning Allah linked that rumor that the L.A. Times is sitting on a sex scandal involving a leading presidential candidate. I tried nosing around a little, and asked Matt Welch about it. Matt is an Assistant Editorial Pages Editor for the paper, and a rare breed: an L.A. Times editor whom I trust. He is honest, smart, and plugged in — and he is definitely not part of the stuffy liberal old guard at the paper. (For example, he recently published a great book about John McCain which ridicules the myth that McCain is a straight-talking maverick.)
And this is from the Harvard report:
The press also gave some candidates measurably more favorable coverage than others. Democrat Barack Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois, enjoyed by far
the most positive treatment of the major candidates during the first five months of the year—followed closely by Fred Thompson, the actor who at the time was
only considering running. Arizona Senator John McCain received the most negative coverage—much worse than his main GOP rivals.
Ok, so I gave a hint there, with the bolded text.
So I guess the question is, do the “stuffy liberal old guard” still run the media, or have the “honest, smart, and plugged in” young hippies taken over? Because I take the point in the first blockquote to be that attacking John McCain shows your independence and how you are not one of the lockstep LSM© liberals, and this gives you the credibility to bat down rumors.
Especially those types of rumors which would be very damaging among religious blacks, Hispanic and white voters, as well as rural Southern democrats. We all know what kind of rumor we’re talking about here (see illustration).
The only problem is, according to the 2nd blockquote, the vast majority of the press seem to be in the “bash McCain” category, so its not really much of a criterion with which to gauge someone’s deviance from the herd and heterogeneity, it seems.
Unless the thesis is now that the old stuffy liberals built up this myth of the “Straight Talk Express”, and now the feisty young progressive turks are knocking him down. THis is of course since its expedient for any leftie, old or young, to hurt any Republican in a presidential race. Still, how this makes Mr. Welch particularly qualified to quash rumors against Democrat sex scandals is unclear.
Anyway, I never meant to revisit this and its pretty weak soup upon which to stretch this much analysis, but its funny nonetheless.