Liberal journalists suggest government censor Fox News
Get Jonathan Strong Feed
If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.
But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio (update: Spitz was a producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center), that isn’t what you’d do at all.
In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.
In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”
Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.
In the summer of 2009, agitated citizens from across the country flocked to town hall meetings to berate lawmakers who had declared support for President Obama’s health care bill. For most people, the protests seemed like an exercise in participatory democracy, rowdy as some of them became.
On Journolist, the question was whether the protestors were garden-variety fascists or actual Nazis.
“You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. “Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.”
Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. “They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state,” Yeselson wrote. “This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts).”
“I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.”
On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5, rated)
Loading ...
“Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.”
Are you suggesting they ignore your example?
NewsBusters| Limbaugh to J-Lister’s Death Wish Apology: ‘Want to Watch Me Die? Say It!’
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/07/24/rush-limbaugh-responds-journolisters-death-wish-apology
Freedom of the press should protect Fox, unless Obama kicks the Constitution aside and implements ObamaPress!
Could a LIST of ALL that were MEMBERS EVER be PUBLISHED?????
IF SO I KNOW who I’d AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE today!!!!
Jonathan,
While it’s good to read vituperation from the lackey media, some of us would like you as a reporter to find a reporter opposing calls for yanking Fox News off the air citing the obviously little known 1st Amendment of the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….”
Wait a minute; there is NO call for a new law! What we have are demands for the president to issue an executive order having one of his appointed regulators do the yanking. With presidential appointees such as Cass Sunstein nudging us with regulations in the Progressive (Communist) direction, we are no longer a nation of law.
Voices in your head?
With this expose – is Fox now guaranteed to get the seat at the WH Press room?
In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.
Does he actually think that a “tough legal framework” would tolerate the kind of nonsense these idiots have been writing? Of course not. So what he’s really calling for is shredding the 1st Amendment and instituting state thought control. Of course, he would be the first to toss out that argument if Republicans were in control of the government. What’s more embarrassing for these clowns? The idiocy or the inconsistency?
“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”
It’s amusing to see these clowns lamenting the “tribal identity” of FOX viewers. But, seriously, what could be more “tribal” than Journolist? And is he actually insinuating that MSNBC is any less “tribal?” So add intellectual dishonesty to the long list of failures of Journolist.
If that happened then the lefties wouldn’t have anything to say about Sarah Palin.
I Wonder if Fox could sue any of them for something? Of course FOX would have to prove damage has been done but I am not a laywer. Perhaps someone can respond.
Because their credibility suffered?
http://www.healthpolicyanalysis.com/2010/07/conspiracy-much-ado-about-journolist.html