Yesterday Big Journalism first told you how NBC’s Dylan Ratigan and other media types were actively working with Occupy Wall Street to help them craft messaging (and in some cases, completely revise statements themselves) while simultaneously reporting on the movement as an objective network anchor. Afterwards, Retracto and I placed bets on the quickness with which Media Matters would spin for the embattled Ratigan. (I won, but Retracto was close.)
Eric Boehlert responded early this afternoon:
Since Boehlert edits a site called Media Matters, and since the primary obsession/focus of this website is Fox News, I figured Boehlert had written a piece detailing how Fox itself had clandestinely written talking points for the tea party while reporting on the movement. I asked Boehlert to produce this link, but as happens any time you bring up facts, Boehlert went silent.
The fact is that Media Matters wrote no such piece and Boehlert has no link to produce because it never happened.
The three people who read Media Matters valiantly tried to throw a besieged Boehlert a rope with the kooky argument that any Fox coverage of the tea party was equal to NBC’s Ratigan writing talking points for Occupiers. One asserted that 9/12 was a Fox event; it was not. In reality, Fox ran as far as it could from 8/28 and was one, if not the only, network to not report on 8/28 at all. This argument is invalid however, because it assumes that the 8/28 event was a tea party when it was not; the purpose of the 8/28 event was American unity. I was in DC covering the event; I saw not one Gadsen flag.
Another tried to insist that 9/12 was also the same as an NBC anchor writing notes for protesters and reporting on said protesters–except 9/12 isn’t a political group, it’s a community group. From the site itself:
The 9/12 Project is a volunteer based, non-partisan movement focusing on building and uniting our communities back to the place we were on 9/12/2001.
[…]
… It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
On your right to disagree “In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude; every man will speak as he thinks, or more properly without thinking.” George Washington …
There is only one group endorsed by the Nazi Party, supported by communists, a group that has scored over a thousand arrests, a group where felons are arrested with guns, a group that threatens to kill people, a group where they desecrate the flag and defecate on cop cars, spit on uniformed Coast Guard members, and that group is the Obama-endorsed, cop-killer endorsed, Pelosi-blessed occupy movement for which NBC’s Dylan Ratigan served in some capacity as an editor while reporting on them.
I wouldn’t expect a group paid by SEIU to apparently attack its victims to understand “disclosure” or “conflict.”
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