My Letter To Chuck Todd After He Let Russert Lie About Lisa Myers...

[GR]

Dear Mr. Todd:

I have always had the greatest respect for you and your objectivity so was very surprised that you let Tim Russert intimidate you into supporting an untruth which he asserted on this morning's Meet The Press. I am happy that you did get a chance to appear there, but you gave up too much.

I commend you for bringing up the fact that the Dean people felt that Lisa Myers had unfairly represented Dean's statements on the Canadian Television Show. But when Tim Russert said that it was untrue that Lisa Myers had taken excerpts out of context, you AGREED with him.

I find it hard to believe that you haven't seen these details (from the Dean Blog but reprinted in numerous other forums), proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that MYERS DID USE SELECTIVE QUOTES WHICH MISREPRESENTED WHAT DEAN HAD SAID:

"TV Editing
All day long we've seen the television news repeating a short edited segment of a single line taken from a Canadian television show. Here's the full transcript. The discussion centered around the pros and cons of caucuses and primaries:

Dean: On a Saturday, is it easy for me to go cast a ballot and spend 15 minutes doing it, or do I have to sit in a caucus for 8 hours?

Guest: This is a good thing, though.

Dean: I don't think so. I don't have the time to do it. It doesn't get people involved. It drives people out of the process, and leaves the people who are left in the process -- the professional people who get paid to be there.

Guest: Let the people in the neighborhoods convince you, say...

Dean: They can't convince me. I've got my kid's soccer game. I've got my second job. I've got all these other reasons that I can't do these things.

Guest: If that's the case, the 15 minutes you're going to devote to politics in your year is a pretty perfunctory involvement in politics.

Dean: Not necessarily. I read the papers, maybe I watch television. I form my opinions, I get to go exercise my opinion. But I can't stand there and listen to everyone else's opinion for eight hours about how to fix the world.
Compare this to the way it is reported on television:

NBC Voice Over: Dean even suggested the caucuses were a waste of time for ordinary people
Dean: “I can’t stand there and listen to everyone else's opinion for eight hours about how to fix the world.”


The power of editing to create a story."

The editing that Myers and NBC did made it appear that Dean didn't want to listen to others opinions and that he was talking specifically about Iowa and not caucuses vs. primaries in general. These are certainly out of context distortions and should be identified as such.

I understand ambition is a powerful force, as is wanting to please the person who employs you, but the reporting by Myers was so egregiously off base, and unfortunately so detrimental to Dean's campaign, among undecideds, that in order to maintain your journalistic integrity, you needed to TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT IT and call Russert on his dissembling.

I only hope this sort of expediency will not be something that you, in good conscience, repeat in the future. I would hope that you would call Russert and tell him today that you were in error in not standing up to him and that he should correct the Myers distortions.

[Kathleen04]

1. Good letter..

I agree, Chuck Todd should have answered that the comments were taken out of context.

[JasonDeter]

2. Media whores have no conscience. Russert has no conscience.

Don't expect anything right to be done by those people. And isn't that a sad state of American politic? How sad for America. The media more than the politicians are responsible for the imminent demise of America's preeminence in world affairs.

[stopbush]

3. Excellent letter. Those of us who grew up when the press WAS

objective need to face the new reality, and that new reality is that today's press ACTIVELY LOOKS FOR WAYS TO PORTRAY DEMS NEGATIVELY AND REPIGS POSITIVELY. How else can one explain the black-is-white nature of our media?

The Dean caucus "issue" is but one example. When Joe Trippi called Paula Zahn on HER lying yesterday, she stonewalled him and refused to read the sentences that put context to Dean's words. If Dean said "I would NEVER condone sending our young people off to die in any war based on lies, especially an illegal war," the press would have the quote as "Dean said, and we quote, "I would...condone sending our young people off to die in any war...especially an illegal war." It's like when a movie reviewer pens, "I'm sure that the makers of this film thought they had a real Oscar contender on their hands, but this movie sucks," and the billboard at the movie house proclaims "...a real Oscar contender..." above its marquee. Context is everything.

Hell, they're doing it already - the cut-n-paste quote given a big assist through the magic of the elliptical omission.

[Cha]

4. Thanks for your letter to chuck todd.

I heard for a fact ...todd said on c-span once that he was a Democrat and had worked in Democratic campaigns.

I don't know why he let the whore russert get away with the whore myers.."Lisa Myers had unfairly represented Dean's statements on the Canadian Television Show."..latest on Dean!

[TacticalPeek]

5. Atta person! Kudos.

Atrios at Eschaton has been particularly brutal to media whores in recent posts, covering this episode and others.

Scroll down to Friday, "NBC News Whores", where, reprising the Daily Howler, he slices and dices Lisa Meyers even more bloodily than she did the Web Hubbell tapes (talking to his wife, jail tapes). That she still has a job in journalism tells the story of the media in our time.

[buycitgo]

6. YESSSSS!!!! I knew it!

I saw that exchange, and, knowing the principals' records (Myers/Potato), automatically inferred that they were LYING.

not having seen the Dean interview, though, I didn't know for certain.

after reading your most excellent letter, with salient details, I am not surprised in the least.

I'll be taking some details from yours, if you don't mind, and include them in emails to both those government media gauleiters.

rerun of that show tonight on MSNBC or CNBC......can't keep the propaganda outlets straight.

[Cocoa]

7. the most ludicrous thing about the Myers piece

it shows footage of the building where the tapes were "found", playing up the thing like it's a huge scandal, like it was evidence in one of their stupid crime shows.

[spooky3]

8. very good letter. Sorry it was necessary to write it.