Via Atrios, I saw a reverberation of the story about the Washington Post shutting down their comments section because Deborah Howell couldn't admit she was just making things up, or repeating Republican propaganda or both, ...and allegedly because some folks used some words that they probably shouldn't have.
So, the Washington Post.com's Jim Brady speaks to none other than Hugh Hewitt, the religious right's answer to Hank the Angry Drunken dwarf about it..
HH: Moving from an interview with the Vice President to an interview with Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, the phenomenally successful online edition of the Washington Post. Mr. Brady, welcome. Before we get to the meltdown yesterday, and your response today, you were a very fine sports for many years, and you were covering sports at the Post from '87-'95, correct?
JB: Correct.
HH: And you were the sports editor there from '95-'99, correct?
JB: On the website.
HH: Yup. So I think you'd have to agree that the Cleveland Indians of '97 and '99 were perhaps the best team ever not to have won the World Series?
JB: Well, as a Long Island native, I'd have to go with the '86 Mets, but that's just me.
HH: Well then, well, we hope you're a better web editor than you are a sports judge.
JB: (laughing)
HH: Jim Brady, you had a meltdown...A) congrats on going online today and answering your critics, and congrats for coming here. Explain to the audience what happened yesterday.
JB: This actually all started on Sunday when the ombudsman of the newsman, Deborah Howell wrote a column about the Abramoff scandal, and in that column, made a reference to both Republicans and Democrats being the beneficiary of Abramoff donations. And what she should have said, and what she put up on the blog on Thursday was that he directed...he did direct contributions to Democrats, which is undeniable. There's lot of documents that show that. But when she wrote it in the column, it was phrased in a way that made it seem like he was personally giving money to the Democrats, of which there isn't proof of that at this point. So on Thursday, she put a clarification up, and we had already been getting hundreds and hundreds of comments about her column, and they were very, very nasty, using words that I didn't even know existed. And after she put the clarification up yesterday, it just got worse and worse, to the point where we just felt like we were not able to keep...we were unable to get rid of the offensive comments faster than they were coming. And so we decided, you know, to take the comments in that blog down for a little while, just to let things cool off, and for us, to look at how do we make sure this doesn't happen in the future. Do we get technology that makes it easier to weed these out? Or do we just pour more human beings on the case? So...
(Bullshit remark in red...)
Folks have pretty much aready debunked the "directed contributions" thing: there isn't a shred of evidence to show that Abramoff was directing contributions to anyone other than Repubicans, nor was there any evidence that there was anything illegal about some groups' contributions to Democrats.
Now, on to my real rant...profane? meltdown?
You want a profane meltdown? How bout considering for a microsecond a politically powerful group that equates zygotes and the brain-dead with living people.
That's fucking bullshit.
How about a regime that sees no problem with using scare tactics to maintain their political power.
That's fucking bullshit.
How about a regime that has screwed up Medicare, disaster relief, the budget, the long term viability of the US economy, civil liberties, the ability of the US to defend itself from foreign enemies, and has engaged on a relentless war against the truth and the English language itself?
Now that simply is ...worse than fucking, bullshit.
That's so profane I can't even find good potty-mouth words to express it.
And finally, how about a media that is nothing but a cheap, two-bit propaganda mill, with less truth in it than Communist regimes' propaganda rags runing full tilt?
Now that's really profane.
No comments:
Post a Comment