Media Matters for America: MSNBC's shoddy "obsessive and misleading" Blago coverage

* Brewer & Stoddard continue MSNBC's shoddy Blago coverage
By Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser

The Hill's A.B. Stoddard was on MSNBC this afternoon discussing the media's focus on Barack Obama's purely theoretical (and not alleged by anyone) involvement in the Blagojevich allegations:

"They've pushed that off into next week and according to lawyers quoted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, they're just choosing to do this. They're choosing not to talk. They're under no legal impediment. There's no injunction against them. Although Patrick Fitzgerald doesn't want them to talk, they're not legally kept from doing so. They're not. They're choosing not to talk. So in some ways Barack Obama is sort of doing this to himself. He's going to keep getting those questions and it's going to be a feeding frenzy next week."

See, the media feeding frenzy is Obama's fault: if he would just disclose the contacts between his staff and Blagojevich, it would all go away.

This, of course, is inane. The questions most certainly would not go away. Indeed, they would intensify. Stoddard kept insisting that Obama is under no obligation not to talk. True. True, but dumb. Dumb because if Obama blows off Fitzgerald's request, the media would go into a frenzy about whether that means he is impeding the investigation, and why. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that A.B. Stoddard would be an active participant in it....

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Later, (Contessa) Brewer told Stoddard: "I know there are journalists who are taking a lot of heat for not being aggressive and tough with Obama."

Yeah, and there are journalists who are taking heat for being unfair to Obama by obsessively and misleadingly covering the story, despite the fact that there is no allegation that Obama or any of his staff has done anything wrong. But Brewer didn't mention that.

http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200812170015

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* Discussing Obama's response to press questions about Blagojevich, MSNBC's Shuster, NY Times' Leibovich ignored Fitzgerald's reported request for delay
By Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser

On the December 17 edition of MSNBC Live, anchor David Shuster said the scandal surrounding Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) "is providing a fresh test" for the press, which "politicians on the right have often accused ... of being soft on Barack Obama." Shuster went on to say that Obama and his staff decided "repeatedly" to "release virtually no information about the Blagojevich scandal."

Later in the segment, New York Times national political correspondent Mark Leibovich said Obama's reference to the ongoing investigation in refusing to release information this week, while "probably appropriate," "does hearken to a kind of echo of what other White Houses in the past have said when they don't want to answer questions immediately."

Though Shuster and Leibovich noted that Obama has cited the ongoing investigation to explain his silence, neither of them mentioned during the segment that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald reportedly requested that Obama "delay the release of a report" about an internal review of the contacts between Obama's aides and the Illinois governor's office, or that Obama cited Fitzgerald's request during a December 15 press conference.

Further, neither Shuster nor Leibovich noted during the segment that Fitzgerald stated in his December 9 news conference that the complaint "makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever -- his conduct."...

http://mediamatters.org/items/200812170019?f=h_latest

the last program. Her lead story was a lie when I heard it.

She has quite a record on media matters for being a republican shrill over time.

Everyone hates Morning Joe but it seems they start the talking points
for the rest of the day and they did it again this morning after I had
a few DUers confirm that since it was too early for me to watch.

The media is our enemy and the blogs and the internet must hold them
accountable for their lies.