Pundit Police Watch News Talkers 24 / 7

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT/AP: Pundit Police Watch News Talkers 24 / 7
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 17, 2008

NEW YORK (AP) -- Fewer than a half-million people were watching MSNBC when David Shuster made his comment that Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign had ''pimped out'' daughter Chelsea by having her make political phone calls. Among them were monitors at Newsbusters. The Web site posted video of Shuster 10 minutes after the show was over, beginning a reaction that led to his two-week suspension.

The pundit police never go off duty. Say something stupid, offensive or incorrect on television and you're going to hear about it -- fast. Web sites and bloggers record everything on news programs, an obsessive attention that can foster a hypersensitivity over words and deepen the nation's partisan divide. Without question, they remind pundits that it's important to think before they speak....

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Two pundit police chiefs are Media Matters, from the left, and the Media Research Center, from the right. The MRC operates Newsbusters.

Media Matters was founded in 2004 by David Brock, the former conservative who switched allegiances. Its goal is to watch conservative media figures and hang them by their words, publicizing their statements to the wider world and challenging them on facts....Fox's Bill O'Reilly is a frequent target; he calls Media Matters ''an assassination Web site.'' L. Brent Bozell, nephew of conservative icon William F. Buckley, started the Media Research Center in 1987 with the goal of becoming the conservative movement's ombudsman. It tries to sniff out signs of liberal bias and takes the media to task for gaffes, the same standards journalists hold for reporters, said Tim Graham, the center's director of media analysis....

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One worry within the punditry world is that there are different standards for outrage based on the power of the speaker. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said she'd probably be fired if she played a satirical song titled ''Barack the Magic Negro,'' yet Rush Limbaugh did it with little consequence. Some critics have wondered why Shuster was suspended for his words while (Chris) Matthews, one of MSNBC's top personalities, didn't miss a day of work (after apologizing for suggesting Clinton's political prominence was due to her husband's infidelities).

Maddow said people on TV should expect scrutiny from pundit police as part of the job. ''They may have my head at some point,'' she said, ''but I think we're better off as a country by there being pundit police and having different pundit police, preferably without a partisan agenda, then if we didn't have people making us accountable for what we say.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-AP-on-TV-Pundit-Police.html

[tularetom]

1. There is nobody more together on radio or TV than Rachel Maddow

and her comments are right on in this case, as usual.