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No,
both sides don't do what Breitbart does
Democrats would never do anything sneaky...
Now that today's New York Times has
weighed in on this topic,
I'm going to hit this one more time, because I'm telling ya, it's
important.
As I've been noting here, the real takeaway from the Shirley Sherrod
mess is this:
Not all partisan media are created equal. Right wing media are willing
to engage in tactics
that simply have no equivalent on the left -- even if mainstream news
orgs and commentators
keep taking refuge behind the notion that "both sides do it."
To make this point one more time, it's true that "both sides," to one
degree or another,
let their ideological and political preferences dictate some editorial
decisions, such as what
stories to pursue, how to approach them, who to interview, etc. But
what's underappreciated
is the degree to which the Breitbart-Fox axis goes far beyond this,
openly employing techniques
of political opposition researchers and operatives to drive the media
narrative.
This simply has no equivalent on the left. The leading lefty media
organizations have teams
of reporters who -- even if they are to some degree ideologically
motivated -- work to determine
whether their material is accurate, fair, and generally based in
reality before sharing it with readers
and viewers. They just don't push info -- with no regard to whether
it's true or not -- for the sole
purpose of having maximum political impact. Period.