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The Post’s flawed, but instructive, bias
Posted Nov 10, 2009 by Tom Jackson
Updated Nov 10, 2009 at 05:50 PM
Only among my brethren in the main stream media would someone who supports the following – union card-check, gay marriage, limitless abortion rights – be regarded as politically moderate.
But time and time again that is the narrative lens through which the tale of Dede Scozzafava is viewed.
Today’s misleading hack job arrives from the Washington Post. In it, the fatally flawed, handpicked choice of the party elite for the Republican nomination in the New York-23 special congressional election receives fawning coverage from reporter Jason Horowitz as a reasonable woman scorned by the obsessively conservative, self-appointed Ahabs navigating the GOP onto the rocks of intolerance and irrelevance.
Which is patent nonsense.
Paul Mirengoff of Power Line weighs in:
The claim that Scozzafava is, in fact, a “moderate” constitutes the core of Horowitz’s over-the-top claim that the Republican party is “dysfunctional.” Accordingly, Horowitz repeats this assertion several times. He fails, however, to support it. His only reference to Scozzafava’s actual positions on substantive issues calls her positions on gay rights, abortion, and organized labor “less than orthodox.”
This is a transparently dishonest effort to obscure the extent of Scozzafava’s “unorthodoxy” – which is, of course, the essential question in determining whether she is a moderate or a liberal. Horowitz declines to mention, for example, that Scozzafava favors card check legislation that would undermine the right of workers to determine through a secret ballot whether they want to be represented by a union. …
This dismissiveness goes to the heart of Horowitz’s elaborate, unexamined bias.
Horowitz thus fails to demonstrate Scozzafava’s moderation. … He is successful, though, in portraying her as utterly frivolous and vapid. In Horowitz’s account, Scozzafava endorsed the Democrat in the race following her withdrawal because the White House orchestrated a campaign of friendly calls from the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer. Beats flowers every time. …
Horowitz concludes these talking points on what he no doubt thinks is an ominous note:Those conservative forces now descend on Florida, where former House speaker Marco Rubio, who on Monday received the endorsement of the Club for Growth, might shove aside centrist Gov. Charlie Crist, who was once on John McCain’s short list for running mate.
Behind the absurd imagary, right-wingers swarming like locusts into the Sunshine State, this is a dog-bites-man story if there ever was one. Just imagine, conservatives are going to support a conservative in the primary instead of someone John McCain likes.
Horowitz’s skewed analysis emerges from a defective premise, but the defect is utterly instructive. It reflects in the author – and the editors through whose hands the story passed on its way to publication – an irretrievably liberal orientation nurtured within a far-left bubble. Within that “normal,” views approaching Horowitz’s would naturally be “moderate,” leaving all other opinions to dwell on the fringe right.
Never mind polls indicating that the number of Americans who consider themselves conservative has surged since the November 2008 elections, and that independents are flowing to the right, much to the benefit of Republican prospects for 2010. Let Jason Horowitz and those who share his stripe enjoy their illusions of conservative dysfunction while they last.
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Reader Comments
Por (Idiotwind) on November 11, 2009 (Suggest removal)
This is what print journalism has been reduced to. It’s an insider’s game, with one commentator commenting on another commentator’s blather, and no one else paying much attention.
Anything happening in Pasco these days?
When would you like to meet at Hungry Harry’s?
Suggest removal