According to a CBS News overnight poll, 58% of those surveyed said that the awful tragedy that occurred in Tucson, Arizona over the weekend was not due to angry, violent political rhetoric from the right-wing.
Wait, what?
Okay, first off, who knew that CBS still had a news division? My impression, judging by their current nightly 'newscasts', was that they were no longer in the 'serious' news biz and had just fully given into being corporate apologists 24/7 with the occasional celebrity fluff piece thrown in for shits and grins. This became even more apparent after they hired quite possibly the worst excuse for an anchor-person in the history of network television (absolutely zero journalistic credibility, but a nice pair of legs and a blindingly white smile), and their ratings still went straight through the floor.
Secondly, I doubt that 58% of those that CBS claims to have surveyed could find Arizona on the map, never mind Tucson.
Thirdly, this poll is the most glaringly obvious example of the smoke-screen the M$M is laying down in an attempt to cover up their own culpability in the tragic events of this past weekend. Whilst the gunman is quite clearly out of his frigging tree, his rantings and ravings point to a train of thought that is decidedly right-wing in nature. So what does the M$M do? They spend the next 48 hours doing their damnedest to paint him as simply a "crazed, lone gunman" (gee, why does that sound so familiar?) rather than someone that spouted right wing talking points in his garbled messages on youtube.
Why would they do that? Simple. The corporate media in this country enthusiastically embraced the emergence of the far-right Tea Party, as well as the grammatically-challenged morons that came crawling out of the woodwork, atrociously spelled signs and all, after Barack Obama was elected President, and now after one of the inevitable chickens has apparently come home to roost, they are desperately scrambling for cover.
You don't believe me, you think I am exaggerating? Take a look at their actions over the last couple of years.
They actively covered the Teabagging rallies (if that is what you call Klan meetings these days) thereby legitimizing them, and even used the Teabaggers vernacular in their reporting, 'Health Care Reform' became 'Obamacare' for example. They gave them the forums into which the rightwing could pour all of its angry, hate-filled discourse.
They gleefully covered townhall meetings where they felt physical conflict might result in someone getting a good old-fashioned ass-kicking (don't forget the number one mantra in news journalism has always been 'if it bleeds, it leads').
They allowed right-wing lunatics like Sharon Angle of Nevada to repeat, over and over again, that perhaps citizens should consider "2nd amendment remedies" if they didn't like what Congress was doing, and they didn't chide Caribou Barbie, the half-term ex-governer of Alaska, when she went so far as to put a map of the US on her website with gunsight targets over several Democratic districts. (She also said about her supporters "they don't retreat, they reload" the M$M thought that was 'folksy' and just 'Sarah being Sarah').
They didn't say a word when extremist commentators in the right-wing media called for the killing of liberals as an example to others (Ann Coulter R-Adams Apple), or suggested that all liberals be killed, except a few that should be left on university campuses across the country as examples of political fossils (Rush Limbaugh R-Oxycontin).
They didn't say a word when a certifiable lunatic on the Faux network (I know, I need to be more specific here because they are all a bunch of certifiable lunatics, in this instance I am of course referring to Glenn Beck, the Lunatic-In-Chief, if you will) said that he had thought about murdering Michael Moore, and poisoning Nancy Pelosi's drinks.
They said nothing. Not a sausage. At least, not until this past saturday.
It's almost as though they were getting into high gear even before the echoes of the gunshots had faded, trying to frame this in any way they could that would minimize their own culpability. The right-wing media immediately tried to paint the shooter as a 'pot-smoking liberal' (hence the insistence on only using his high school yearbook picture when he had long hair, you know, just like a godless hippy, rather than a more recent one which showed him with much shorter hair). The rest of the corporate media allowed a not un-surprisingly large percentage of republican politicians versus democratic ones, to use the airwaves to express their 'shock' and 'horror' in a pathetically transparent way of trying to get in front of the issue.
It wasn't until it almost got completely derailed by the local Sheriff when he came on the air and spoke very passionately and eloquently of the blame the media shared in allowing such vitriolic right-wing hate speech to pollute political discourse, that the presstitutes really went into overdrive. They got every commentator they could find, no matter how irrelevant, onto the air to talk about how "we can't be sure of the shooters' political affiliations" and how when it came to violent rhetoric "both sides do it". That second part is the most blatant and shameless of all of the lies they have spouted since Saturday. We may indeed not know 100% what the murderers' political bent is, but we DO know for an absolute fact that the 'left' does not, in any way, shape or form, engage in the same sort of violent, hate-filled rhetoric which is de rigeur for the right. Not even close, but according to that CBS poll this morning, their spin seems to have worked.
Mission Accomplished.
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