It’s easy to forget that before the Moonies put him in charge of the Washington Times, John Solomon was writing misleading, Democrat-bashing articles for the Washington Post and the AP:
In his pitch at the Heritage Foundation, Solomon made all of this explicit. The Times, he explained, played an important role in pushing stories that the White House didn’t like. “Before Andrew Breitbart did the ACORN series,” he said, “we did 47 stories about ACORN.” He explained how TheConservatives.com could run the news cycle by arguing that its “Right People” aggregator, which collects tweets and news from a small group of influential conservatives, changed the debate over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The site was in demo mode, available to Times reporters.
“When we were demoing this, we were running Newt Gingrich as a personality,” explained Solomon. “Everything Newt Gingrich did on the social media space–on Facebook, on Twitter–was aggregating through the technology. We were sitting there–[seasoned Times reporter] Ralph Hallow was sitting alongside of me–and all of a sudden this little Twitter burst comes up from Newt, saying Sotomayor was racist. We jumped on it, we put that out there. That created, as you remember, days and days of a firestorm about whether her personal views about race and gender were biasing her views from the bench.”
Just to be clear: when Solomon was at the AP and Washington Post, he was widely accused of writing ideologically-motivated pieces of dubious authenticity. The Post and AP defended him to the hilt. Now he’s openly bragging about doing exactly what his critics accused him of.
Anyway, all of this proves that the media has a strong liberal bias.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
Is that good news for conservatives everywhere?
Beauzeaux
Isn’t there a word stronger than “assholes” we can use to describe these people? They really are causing harm to the nation. That goes beyond assholishness, I believe.
TenguPhule
The rot can only be purged with fire.
TenguPhule
Pustule on the buttocks of the galaxy.
Mr Furious
Oh, I haven’t forgotten that asshole…
ronin122
@Wile E. Quixote: Only if it’s also excellent news for John McCain
Rock
So, publishing a Newt Gingrich tweet is the kind of thing that now makes journalists proud? Truly we are in golden age.
John Cole
Why do you hate America.
Cain
@Beauzeaux:
Yes, the pain of a bee hive attack on your a-hole. Well that’s how they make me feel.
cain
Morbo
Hmm, they’re proud of having changed the debate on Sonia Sotomayor. Say, how did that work out for you, John Solomon?
Citizen_X
Boy, completely changed the course of history there, didn’t they? Look upon the works of the right-wing echo chamber, ye mighty liberal media, and despair!
Cain
You’re open thread is too old. Since this is liberal media related. At least one blog thinks Obama is dong a pretty good job
cain
h/t matthew yglesias
jcricket
What this proves is that I am insufficiently cynical, once again. I pretty much assumed Solomon was bending over backwards to avoid “appearing” liberally biased, like so many Villagers do.
Instead he was FUCKING PLAYING FOR THE OTHER TEAM.
If the mainstream media wants to exist in 10 years they should pretty much say give conservatives a big middle finger and start writing some actual factual news stories.
Attempting to appease conservatives (as they are fond of saying about others) will fail, so why bother?
Ruckus
@Beauzeaux:
1. Cocksucker, but it seems to actually be true with many conservative men so it wouldn’t have the effect straight people believe it does.
2. Puss filled sore/boil, but once again the truth may lack the stinging properties.
3. Douche nozzle doesn’t fit as this is a useful item for humanity.
4. Asshole is another useful tool that we all have, however as most of us leave it in our pants and don’t display it on our shoulders this one has merit, but the usage may be to common.
Ok this can go on for a while and I’d like to think of nice things now.
ItAintEazy
What about “gaping asshole”?
Sly
“Boil on the Ass of the Republic” works for me in terms of any person who’s raison d’etre is to transform any rational political discourse into a sideshow of equal parts stupid, childish, and trivial. Think Frank Luntz.
Napoleon
This subject merits a link to a prior thread of Doug’s and my comment in it which in part is as follows:
balloon-juice.com/?p=25333#comment-1327868
kommrade reproductive vigor
Except:
It didn’t work.
Newt failed the latest Purity Test, prepare for fake dog turds.
Your paper’s sub rates are still in free-fall.
Maybe he’s trying to set up a buy-out from Murdoch. Don’t see Moon going for that.
Jamey
My take? The Villagers will be cool that Solomon rat-fucked the Kaplan Test Prep Daily.
But they’ll take him out to the woodshed for kissing and telling.
Comrade javafascist
And while we are all shocked, shocked I tell you, by this latest revelation, let’s not pretend this hasn’t pushed Solomon to the top of the list of “People We Must Have Working for Us” at the Kaplan Test Prep Post.
Brian J
This is pretty amusing, since around the times the Obama campaign and administration has hired people, some of them came from positions in the media world. Linda Douglass and John/Jay Carney come to mind; maybe there are others. Republicans naturally bitched that it was astounding someone who used to work for a mainstream publication like TIME was working for Biden (in Carney’s case), yet nobody could point to any sort of shitty reporting on his behalf. Meanwhile, there were several questionable writings, to say the least, from people like Fournier, yet their response “Nothing to see here, folks! LALALALALALALALA!”
Assholes.
Roger Moore
@jcricket:
But they aren’t trying to appease the conservatives, as you point out earlier in your comment. They’re trying to ally with them, which is a much more workable strategy. The conservatives are going to need a propaganda machine for the foreseeable future. Shifting from the uncertain world of news to the much more stable world of marketing is a clever move for the ones who get in early enough.
jayjaylanc
The Village goatse?
Church Lady
In your eyes, the outlier of one conservative writer at the Washington Post (and yes, I’m know that there are a few others, particularly on the editorial pages) proves that the media, on average, doesn’t lean liberal? Pu-leese. Yeah, and the Times is secretly conservative too. Frank Rich, MoDo, and the editorial staff have just been yankin’ our chains for all these years.
Scamp Dog
@Church Lady:
MoDo is a liberal? I can’t think of any actual political ideas she has; all she does is write catty things about people she doesn’t like, and she hated the Clintons and Al Gore. She said a few mean things about W. after he was safely re-elected in 2004, but she mostly gets her hate on for major Dems.
handy
@Church Lady:
Frank Rich is a liberal I’ll grant you that (and very dumb, too, but whatever), but like Scamp Dog said, MoDo is a completely vacuous ninny. And I wouldn’t exactly call a conservative writing an op-ed at the WaPo an “outlier” by any stretch, considering people like Broder regularly fill up their columns.
Paul in KY
How about Smegma Sucking Diseased Parasites (SSDPs)?
I was in the USAF, we’re pretty big on acronyms :-)