Reply #8: Greg Mitchell in Huffington Post agrees with you (as do I) [View All]

[RamboLiberal]

New TIME Cover on Glenn Beck Ignores Facts, and Worse

I have no quarrel with TIME magazine devoting a cover to Glenn Beck -- so long as the accompanying story sticks to hard facts and harsh truths. The issue coming tomorrow, online today, sadly fails to do so in an apparent effort to woo the rightwing with a ludicrously "balanced" treatment of equally dangerous and wacko "ranting" coming from left and right.

It starts right away with a first paragraph that claims that only "liberal sources" estimated the protest crowd in D.C. last weekend as about 70,000, while conservatives say up to a million or more. Actually, virtually all mainstream media sources, along with nonpartisan factchecking organizations such as PolitiFact, cite the lower number.

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In this nugget TIME's Dave Von Drehle revealed his method. The "left" says one thing, the "right" another and, hell, who is to know the truth? He returns to this late in the piece by raising the crowd estimate gap again and explaining it as merely "who do you trust?"

Repeatedly he refers to mere "suspicion and feelings of helplessness" -- as if that was all to the ugly words and behavior we have seen, and that it was a natural response to Obama's "takeover," not something darker, and Beck-related. Ditto for casting these Americans as "scared" -- but why and on what basis are they scared?

There's a scattering of extreme Beck quotes lost in many paragraphs on the money deals. And groups like Media Matters are accused of "cherry picking" the bad ones. But then, they are just part of the "rant industry" on the left. There's a long, long graf quoting Beck on 9/11 and the Freedom Towers but no mention of his attack on the 9/11 widows. It notes his assault on the Obama "czars" and "he has some radical-sounding sound bites to back it up."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/time-cover-on-beck-mutila_b_289890.html