Over the weekend, conservative bloggers pounced on a seriously biased headline from the McClatchy News Service on their website. The editorializing news service’s statement was discovered by @McClatchyWatch on Twitter on Sunday.
Dan Riehl at Riehl World View summed up the McClatchy headline meme this way:
All it claims is some alleged hate for Obama by Southern Republicans with no explanation for it at all. Perhaps McClatchy wants to leave its readers free to figure out some motivation for any alleged hate for Obama. Ya think? If McClatchy wants to write about hatred in American politics, they’d be better off rounding up the Left’s reactions to any black conservative. Justice Clarence Thomas might be a good place to start. But they’re probably more likely to just portray him as dumb.
Riehl also points out that, given their standards of accuracy, perhaps McClatchy reporters weren’t even at the conference itself:
By STEVEN THOMMA
McClatchy Newspapers
NEW ORLEANS — Southern Republicans wrapped up a three-day meeting in New Orleans on Saturday unified in fervent opposition to President Barack Obama, but wide open at this early stage about whom they want to challenge him in 2012.
Party activists at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) cheered potential presidential candidates such as Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty, as well as absentee Mitt Romney.
Maybe they weren’t even there, given that Pawlenty wasn’t either. I guess the facts don’t really matter at all to McClatchy.
McClatchy has a history of biased headlines and articles labeled as “news,” so it isn’t surprising that this headline appeared as their lead to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
Another recent example of McClatchy’s editorializing in its news coverage was their view of the Iraqi parliamentary elections in March. McClatchy newspapers carried a front-page story repeating left-wing talking points about the War in Iraq:
When the Bush administration invaded Iraq seven years ago, it pledged to leave behind a democracy that would be a model for the entire Middle East. Instead, it now appears that the United States will leave behind a big question mark.
Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Iraq will start the clock on the withdrawal of U.S. troops, with 50,000 soldiers remaining in an advisory role after Aug. 31 and all of them gone by the end of 2011, if current plans hold.
The elections are, in a sense, the final act of a U.S.-led invasion that the George W. Bush White House sold on false pretenses – nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, an imaginary nuclear-weapons program and fictional al-Qaida ties – and that has cost nearly 4,400 American lives, at least 100,000 Iraqi ones, as much as $3 trillion and untold political capital.
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The “sold on false pretenses” is complete editorializing based on leftist interpretations of the Bush Administration’s actions, not based on facts. Yet this story appeared on the front pages of McClatchy’s newspapers across the country on March 7.
No wonder newspaper circulation and Americans’ confidence in the mainstream media are at historic lows. Americans need to be vigilant in order to seek out the real truth since the saturation of left-wing opinion has drowned out fact-based reporting in America’s news rooms. The McClatchy enterprise is just one of many butchers of our free press these days.
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