PRESS PATTERNS
"Wag the Dog?" Don't Blame Conservatives [Stephen Spruiell]
ABC's Jake Tapper takes a lot of the points the Cornerites made over the weekend about Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News Sunday and rolls them up into one blog post, with a twist:
ON THE OTHER HAND...there's the mainstream media.
The conservative Media Research Council NOTED that "every network did raise the "Wag the Dog" scenario." And indeed, according to the MRC story linked above, CBS ABC and NBC all raised the notion — with Senator Coats as a leading voice.
DATELINE NBC devoted a December 1999 piece directly using clips from the film to question the basis for the bombing.
And Frank Bruni of the New York Times devoted A WHOLE STORY TO THE NOTION.
So...quite frankly, it looks as though the "mainstream" media did a lot more to question President Clinton than did the GOP leadership apparatus, along with Ashcroft, Specter and Coats. The mainstream media along with conservative media such as WORLDNETDAILY.
Howard Kurtz has more from interviewer Chris Wallace:
"I thought it was a fair, balanced and not especially inflammatory question," Wallace said yesterday in recounting his "Fox News Sunday" sit-down with Clinton. "I even said, 'I know hindsight is 20/20.' But he went off. And once he went off, there was no bringing him back. He wanted to talk about it in detail. He wanted to conjure up right-wingers and conservative hit jobs and a theory involving Rupert Murdoch that I still don't understand." [...]
Wallace said the surprise is not that he asked Clinton about terrorism but that no other television interviewer did during a round of appearances last week. Clinton, Wallace said, remained "upset" and "angry" after the interview.
More fact-checking and video at Hot Air.
UPDATE: Kurtz should address this in his next column.
09/25 09:55 AM
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