Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Call It "Whoring Whores and The Conflicted Whores Who Whore For Them"

The Daily Howler reports:

Finally, a note on The Founder. At one point, Kurtz explains why only four news shows were studied. �CNN and MSNBC were not included for budgetary reasons,� he says. But just a couple of paragraphs later, he dishes the skinny on Lichter:

KURTZ: �Special Report� aired the least combat footage and 47 percent fewer images of civilian casualties. Lichter recused himself from the research because he is a paid Fox commentator.

Amazing, isn�t it? Lichter�who earns his living rating the networks�is paid by one of the networks he studies! And wouldn�t you know it? MSNBC and CNN, his net�s two competitors, didn�t make it into his report!
We�ve tried to tell you, again and again: Your pampered, perfumed, overpaid pundits have long since ceased to be serious people. Brit Hume engaged in some ludicrous clowning. But Robert Lichter had his hand in the till.

And Dr. A decides:

Howie Kurtz, right-winger, passes along the conclusions of the conservative Center for Media and Public Affairs, about Iraq coverage, with his patented �gee whiz, I don�t have a brain� tone. It finds �fair and balanced� coverage. A FAIR study, unreported by Howie and using entirely respectable standards, found that nearly two-thirds of all sources used by the networks were pro-war. The percentage pro-war U.S. guests was 71 percent. Anti-war voices made up just 10 percent of all sources, and only 3 percent of U.S. sources. In other words, the ratio of pro-war American sources to anti-war was 25 to 1. Of a total of 840 U.S. sources drawn from a pool of ex- or current officials, a grand total of four could be deemed to be anti-war opinions. Of these, two were on PBS and two were on Fox. None at all appeared on any of the major broadcast networks. As for non-officials, anti-war percentages ranged from 4 percent at NBC, 3 percent at CNN, ABC, PBS and FOX, and less than 1 percent � one out of 205 U.S. sources � at CBS.

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