Media matters

Yes, the media does matter. And so does the truth.

It was good to see a major media outlet like ABC News fact-checking aspiring VP Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention last night. As this ABC news article notes, Palin's speech "bent the truth on her record and on the opposition."

Not surprisingly, she left out the part about her remarkable skill at bringing home millions of "earmarked" federal dollars (our tax dollars at work!) to her community, and her support for the $398 million "bridge to nowhere." So much for being a "reformer."

Continuing his record of our-reporting most of the MSM, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show used Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly's own words about candidate Palin to demonstrate their hypocrisy in defending her. Palin gets to demonstrate a fine veneer of hypocrisy too.



On a related front, the organization Media Matters for America has 'deconstructed' and charted the Republican smear campaign against Obama, calling it "Swiftboating 2.0" both for its resemblance to the 2004 smear campaign against John Kerry and for their use of web 2.0 techniques to spread the smears.

Media Matters notes:

Just as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth unleashed on the public a dossier of lies about John Kerry in 2004, this new campaign is on a mission to spread misinformation about a presidential candidate.

We call it "Swiftboating 2.0" not only because it is the latest model of a political smear campaign, but also because it shares features of "Web 2.0" sites like Facebook and MySpace: significant portions of the content are generated by ordinary people and are spread from peer to peer. Swiftboating 2.0 combines these new information pathways with traditional media -- books from conservative publishers, right-wing radio, and conservative pundits and strategists on television -- to spread the smears as widely as possible and force them into the mainstream media.

If you don't want to see America get suckered again, don't help spread the lies...instead, spread the word.