Right wrong again

Remember in the not too distant past how the right wing was howling and the "liberal" media was wall to wall with the story of how Newsweek supposedly had committed an act of treason by printing that the Koran was had been flushed down a toilet in the American Gulag in Guantanamo Bay? Supposedly the story had caused anti-American riots in Afghanistan which resulted in loss of life. Remember when the White House actually said that Newsweek admitting their error was not enough, that they ought to never, ever use anonymous sources again and should beg forgiveness for their horrible actions?

First, it wasn't Newsweek that sparked the riots, that was lie number one. There had been several reports of the desecration of the Koran reported from numerous sources in the past. How did the wingers respond to that? They scoffed that all those reports were based on accounts of detainees themselves, people who "hate America" and who were coached to say such things to cause trouble.

Well what do you know?

The Pentagon late Friday confirmed five incidents of Koran desecration at the prison for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wrapping up a high-priority investigation.

The findings concluded that one soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book, other guards hit it with water balloons, and a soldier's urine splashed on a prisoner and his Koran.

Details of the incidents are contained in the final report of the inquiry headed by Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the detention center for terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The report established that two other cases of desecration had occurred. In one, a two-word obscenity was written in English inside a prisoner's Koran. In the other, an interrogator deliberately stepped on the book. That interrogator was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."

Charges of Koran desecration triggered vociferous protests in the Muslim world and were blamed for contributing to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan that resulted in more than two dozen deaths. But Hood, in releasing his final report, said his investigators found no proof that U.S. personnel flushed a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay, an assertion reported but later retracted by Newsweek magazine.

Well there ya go. No WONDER the White House, Bush, and all his robotic syncophants were screaming bloody murder. There's no proof that they actually flushed a Koran down the toilet... just that it was urinated on and other various desecrations. No wonder they thought Newsweek should be run out of business.

This is yet another example of the right's incredibly sucessful strategy to effectively neutralize and intimidate the media. What they're doing is "working the refs", and it's worked beyond their wildest dreams.

They incessantly batter the press for every imagined slight, and if there isn't any real grievances, they invent them. They make sure that the anti-press stories get wide play. The result is that the press iss gun shy, and ends up subsconciously or conciously afraid to write anything that could conceivably be regarded as anti-right or anti-Republican. The right are working the refs and getting thousands of simple-minded morons to actually believe the press is full of "liberal bias". So every time the howl about this or that, the loud army of morons sends a blizzard of mail and e-mail and the media gets scared and actually believes this is how America thinks.

The cowardly media, like a beaten dog, gets to the point where they'll do anything to avoid getting brow-beaten. Couple this with the hundreds of millions spent by right wing groups to promote the cannard of the "liberal media", and you have the reason that, far from being liberally biased, you now have a media that will never consider allowing any tough anti-war, anti-Bush stories get anywhere near air or print. And so scared of being accused of bias are they that their idea of balance is to have one far-right pundit "balanced" by a moderate right pundit.

When you shout and yell and bitch and moan at someone long enough, eventually they get cowed, and to their enternal discredit, the press, and moreso their owners, have bought the bullshit and have backed off so far that they are now objectively biased towards the right. They then smuggly assume they must be getting it right because, as they always assert, they get complaints from both liberals and conservatives, which, they think, means they must be balanced. But what they don't realize is that the right will bitch and continue bitching until the media simply prints RNC talking points verbatim.

They don't dare actually do some simple research and report when someone is lying or clearly in error. They might get slammed by the right wing and their media watchdog organizations. So they refuse to offer the public any basic judgement on such crap, thinking that their responsibility ends with simply reporting statements from both sides, even if one side is completely off-base. Almost all stories these days amount to "Right says earth is flat, opinions differ." They don't dare make a values judgement no matter how looney the opinion.

Perhaps it's time for our side to bitch when we see blatant bias. Gotta start somewhere, and when they hear it loud and long from the right, but almost never hear a peep of protest from the left, they'll continue to think they've got it right... literally.