Don’t miss Jill Stewart’s post-mortem on the Los Angeles Times’ attempt to destroy Arnold Schwarzenegger by any journalistic means necessary. Here are money quotes from someone Stewart calls a “longtime, respected Timesian involved in the Schwarzenegger coverage”:
Toward the end, a kind of hysteria gripped the newsroom. I witnessed a deep-seated, irrational need to get something on this guy [Schwarzenegger]. By Wednesday before it was published, I counted not fewer than 24 reporters dispatched on Arnold, and this entire enterprise was directed by John Carroll himself. Carroll launched the project with the words: ‘I want a full scrub of Arnold.’ This was fully and completely and daily driven by Carroll. He’s as good as his word on being balanced and trying to make this paper more balanced, he really is. But not when it came to Schwarzenegger. Carroll changed completely. It was visceral, and he made it clear he wanted something bad on Schwarzenegger and he didn’t care what it was. The air of unreality among people here was so extreme that when they did the office pool, of something like 113 people who put in a dollar to bet on the outcome of the recall and on who would be chosen governor, only 31 bet ‘yes’ on recall and ‘yes’ Schwarzenegger to win. All you had to do was read a poll to know how wrong that was, but inside this place only about 25 percent of the people could see the recall coming… The mainstream press critics like those published on Romenesko are asleep as to what has happened here. They are defending the L.A. Times in every way. There should be no defense by media critics of what happened here. One woman did not sleep for two nights after a Times reporter showed up at her door, with the thinnest evidence, demanding to know if her child was Arnold’s love child. It never panned out, it was untrue. Why has the L.A. Times become a tabloid, knocking relentlessly on people’s doors for tabloid gossip? And would John Carroll have run a front page Love Child story if it had been true? Could we sink any lower?
It was worse than we thought. Which is a good rule of thumb in liberal media outlets. Recall what we now know about the Raines era at the NYT. Then consider what we don’t know about what’s going on now.
WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? USA Today says it’s looking for a conservative editorial writer. Here’s what the ad said: “Looking for a conservative who ca (sic) work to achievie (sic) consensus with a diverse editorial board.” Special attention to bad spellers and masochists.
MOORE WATCH: He seems to be leaning toward the notion that 9/11 was a government conspiracy:
MOORE: I’d like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack.
But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I’d like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I’m sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you’re off by this much, you’re in the Potomac. You don’t hit a five-store building like that.
What on earth is he getting at?
The Dish 