This kind of thing is why I say our national punditry isn’t so much biased as it’s lazy and stupid. Because historical perspective is one of those things you’re supposed to provide in your stories, in your commentary, in your tasks informing the public. Checking the clip file in case this sort of thing has ever occurred before in the world is something you’re supposed to have pounded into you as a must-do.
Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers,
getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with
the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that
their duty as tribunes of the people’s voices means they should treat
Obama’s creation of “death panels” as just another justiciable
political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai
Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That,
not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.
Once upon a time in journalism, it was embarrassing to be played by someone, anyone, with an agenda. Nowadays it’s practically a star turn.
A.