Daily Howler re: Kerry/Drudge

[tishaLA]

Bob gets it right almost every day. And today he is very impressive about the Drudge rumors and how the mainstream media, which mocked Gore in 2000, participated in filleting Kerry before the WO primary. Why won't they talk about that as a background to their coverage of the "surprizingly close race"? Because they are responsible and they want to pretend the story didn't exist, even as they panted and struggled to invent new modes of circumlocution so it could get some air time.

<snip>

So Matt Drudge—a dirt-bag—was wrong on all counts. But that doesn’t mean that his fake, phony story hasn’t already affected your lives. Why did Kerry lose ground in Wisconsin last weekend? On yesterday’s Imus, Jeff Greenfield wondered—and he thought of a famous web dirt-bag. “No, Drudge kept this thing alive,” he said, when Imus said that well-meaning Drudge had just been trying to “cover the coverage.” And then he continued, saying this:

GREENFIELD: You know, we don’t even know—it’s interesting, because I don’t think that exit polls can measure this—we don’t know whether or not the three or four days of under-the-radar, widely speculated stories may have hurt Kerry in Wisconsin, even though there is apparently absolutely nothing to it.

So let’s see. Dirt-bag Drudge sent out a fake story—fake all the way to its last phony detail. And it may have affected the Wisconsin race, in a way which gave Edwards new hope.

Amazing, isn’t it? A well-known dirt-bag peddles some porn—and he affects a White House campaign. But try—just try—to find mainstream journalists who seem upset by all this. For the last two days, Imus has been shilling for Drudge, saying that he was just “covering the coverage.” And here at THE HOWLER, we’ve searched high and low, looking for a member of the press elite who even pretends that he cares about this. What do you do when a gutter runs through it? If you’re a millionaire newsman, you yawn and then hide. To his credit, Tom Oliphant lodged a complaint in the Boston Globe—in a column which principally chastised Clark for having made the now-debunked “intern” remark! But how much outrage have you seen around your millionaire press corps this week? As noted, Imus has spent the past two days trying to vouch for Drudge’s intentions. And how many pundits have you seen mentioning Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity by name? The pair of dirt-bags ran quite fast to lovingly linger on Drudge’s fake tale. But when will the mainstream press call them by name—call them the dirt-bags they are?

<snip>
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh021904.shtml