Oh, just REALLY, CNN:
Blitzer: So there he is, the republican vice presidential nominee and his beautiful family there. His mom is up there. This is exactly what this crowd of republicans here certainly republicans all across the country were hoping for. He delivered a powerful speech. Erin, a powerful speech.Although I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward, I’m sure they will. As far as mitt romney’s campaign is concerned, paul ryan on this night delivered.
The fact-checkers will get to it. Because the journalists aren’t fact-checkers. They don’t keep anybody honest. They just spew out whatever people tell them, and leave the actual work to the fact-checkers. Who, as everyone by now knows, don’t dictate the Romney campaign.
And why should they? They’re just “fact-checkers,” which sounds like the guy who bags your groceries. They’re just the people to whom we have outsourced the job of keeping our democracy honest. I swear, we’re about 40 years late on that cable news ethics panel and it is starting to get on my goddamn nerves.
Keep making the case for the value of journalism, people, while your elder stateman, Wolf Fucking Blitzer, is all, “I’m sure at some point someone will point out the vast swaths of that speech that wereutter bullshit, but for God’s sake let’s not do that on our air while people are looking.”
Sometimes I wish there was actually some kind of Respectable Reporters’ Club, so that they could kick people out for stuff like this. At the very least, the next journalism school to book him for a speech should have to seat six or seven “fact-checkers” next to him to make sure we all know what’s really going on.
A.
“opportunities to dispute”…because facts are open for discussion…
If only there were a way to have knowledgeable people check facts in real-time and deliver that information to the viewers –like some kind of “brain” that could differentiate between political, spin, and fact.
Wolf Blitzer went far beyond being an embarrassment to journalism a long time ago.
He’s an embarrassment totelevision.
And yes, that includes Toddlers & Tiaras and Big Brother.
i noticed the yahoo gnews blurb stating infactual arts of ryans speech DISAPPEARED from the gnews line up.
Makes me want to go back to the days when Comedy Central had live commentators during the convention and important speeches. I’ll never forget Al Franken’s astonished, “That’s a lie!” during one of the first Bush’s state of the union speeches.
Television, from the very start, had the potential to become the most effective propaganda tool ever devised.
And now, I think that potential finally has been realized. After the 1956 elections, Adlai Stevenson said that television would utterly transform politics in this country, and he didn’t envision the half of it, and especially not the Roves and Luntzes that would use every psychological trick known to give lies and bullshit the appearance of cake and ice cream, nor the Blitzers and Burnetts that would be there to feed it to the public in large spoonfuls.
The truth is largely irrelevant today, and we have television and the people who run it to thank for that, I’m afraid.
His Jeopardy debacle shows his contempt for facts in general. He just makes up a word salad. Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the store of human knowledge.
His name is Leslie. “Wolf” was invented by management to make him sound more butch.
It’s not a lack of ability, it’s a lack of desire. Do you ever listen to the commentators on football or baseball games? They have armies of people behind them constantly looking up arcane bits of minutiae: “Well, Bob the last time we had a left-handed batter wearing a white shoe with black laces criss-crossed in a non-traditional ‘YZ’ pattern was 1947 when Hank “Baby Nose” Walters was batting for the now-defunct Ypsilanti Indians.” I mean, WHERE IN THE HELL do they dig this shit up on the spur of the moment?
Which brings me to my point. If they can do THAT for a freaking baseball game, why can’t they do the same thing for political conventions?
Honestly, what a buffoon.
Journalists should be able to check LIES right away. When I think about fact checking, I think about checking oh you know, math figures, like the figures that don’t add up in ryan’s contract with America.
Ya know numbers, like unemployment.
Lies like when a auto plant closes down and who was POTUS at that time, those are lies and should be addressed immediatly.
If wolff can’t detect lies, then he is no better then that other ‘journalist’ type, sarah palin.
One would think that with electronic resources, a news team could check facts in close to real time.
There’s a much easier answer to corporate media hosts like Blitzer:
Kill your TV. Kill the profits that feed them.
Romney campaign doesn’t care about fact checkers – by their own admission.
From Google Translate from
http://www.lemonde.fr/elections-americaines/article/2012/08/30/decries-par-les-republicains-les-fact-checkers-redoublent-d-efforts-sur-paul-ryan_1753436_829254.html
The speech of running mate Mitt Romney was highly anticipated. And despite the declaration of Neil Newhouse, a member of the Romney campaign – “We will not let our country be dictated by fact-checkers”
@Maple: That actually is a topic of serious discussion. Jay Rosen at PressThink basically wrote earlier today, “OK, journos, they’ve thrown down the gauntlet. Walk away, or pick it up and bitchslap them with it?”
@Lex, thanks for the reference. It, and the following article today, made quite interesting reading. I hope that it may be the beginning of a backlash, similar to what A posts. And, in a pie in the sky, hope that it leads to public resentment at being lied to (I can’t get over the incongruity that a common complaint of the public is that politicians lie, yet they never seem to do anything about it).