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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (64479)	3/1/2008 3:21:29 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The Times Goes Looking for Media Bias Power Line Not, as you might expect, in the mirror. Instead, the Times pointed its finger at a television station in the Republican South. This is a spin-off from the recent 60 Minutes story that apparently claimed it was Karl Rove's fault that former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was convicted of bribery and mail fraud. I haven't followed that story closely, assuming that it is another 60 Minutes hoax. The Left blogosphere got excited over the fact that one Alabama television station, WHNT in Huntsville, didn't air the 60 Minutes segment on Siegelman; it went dark for a few minutes just as that segment was in progress. The Times joined its friends on the creepy Left in seeing all the signs of a conspiracy. The paper went so far as to editorialize on the power outage: <<< In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: "Sorry, Cable Trouble." Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a "60 minutes" segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama's former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year. >>> 1955--hey, that was only 53 years ago! These things happen all the time in the South, you know. For the Times, where the South is concerned, it's eternally the 1950s. The paper saw WHNT's power outage as more evidence of a Rovian plot: <<< In this case, if the blackout was intentional, it may also have been counterproductive. Rather than take attention away from allegations that Mr. Siegelman was the victim of a partisan campaign, WHNT's technical glitch seems to lend support to the charge. >>> Of course, conspiracy theories need some kind of evidence to be plausible. The Times came up with exactly one "fact" in support of its theory: Robert M. Bass, one of the station's owners, contributed to George Bush's Presidential campaign. This was pretty stupid on its face; does the Times seriously believe that if Bass was a Bush contributor, it is a reasonable inference that he went crawling around some back room with a pair of pliers to take the station off the air because an attack on Karl Rove was being aired? Unfortunately for the Times, the one "fact" adduced in support of its theory also turned out to be wrong. From today's Corrections section: <<< An article in Business Day on Tuesday about a television station in Huntsville, Ala., that showed a black screen for 12 minutes on Sunday night during a "60 Minutes" report about possible political deception involving the former Bush administration official Karl Rove in the conviction of a former Democratic governor of Alabama referred incorrectly to one of the owners of the station. Robert M. Bass, manager of an investment company that bought the station, WHNT, last year, has been a contributor to Democratic Party candidates, but unlike his brothers in Texas, he has not been a contributor to President Bush. An editorial on Wednesday about WHNT going dark repeated the error. An article about an internal review of the incident by the Huntsville station is on Page C4 today. >>> So the Times was foiled in its quest to find media bias in Alabama's television industry. Next time, it might have better luck if it looks a little closer to home. powerlineblog.com