Obama wants to bail his Palin-smearing dogs out of the pound

Michael O'Brien in The Hill's Blog Briefing Room:

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

[...]

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.

Problem is, Mr. President, your Democrat-Media Complex doesn't do any more "serious fact-checking" than the nutroots blogs it gets its material from. The legacy media seems only too happy to simply publish what it gets from leftist smear blogs with no fact-checking being done in the entire process. Why let facts get in the way of a good smear? 

Case in point: Leftist blogs insisted (and some still do) that Sarah Palin made rape victims pay for "rape kits" when she was mayor of Wasilla. Some prominent Alaska Democrats repeated the lie, and it was reported as fact by the Boston Globe.

Another example: Moonbat blogs have long peddled the lie that as Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent. The lie was repeated by CNN's Soledad O'Brien, who never bothered to investigate it. If she had taken the trouble to do so, she would have learned that Palin actually increased funding for special needs students by nearly 300 percent.

Strike Three: Then there was the hoax in which "Martin Eisenstadt" outed himself as the source for Carl Cameron of Fox News, who passed along the lies that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent and could not name the three countries in NAFTA. Not only did Democrat media outlet The New Republic and leftist website Huffington Post report it, but lamestream media mouthpieces MSNBC and the Los Angeles Times also went along, again without making any effort to verify the story. As it turned out, "Eisenstadt" was a fictional entity cooked up by a couple of hoaxers.

The problem is that even after these embarrassments, liberal "journalists" still doesn't bother to do their jobs to obtain multiple independent sources and investigate leads to determine if they are factual or not. So spare us the pontificating about fact-checking, Mister President. Your lapdog media will say or do anything it thinks it needs to do to deify you and demonize Sarah Palin, and you damn well know it.

Kim Priestap gets the closing quote:

Journalistic integrity? Fact-based reporting? Serious investigative reporting? Obama thinks it’s ok to bail out the newspapers in order to preserve these characteristics? Who does he think he’s kidding? If the mainstream media had done even the slightest amount of fast-based or serious investigative reporting about him and his radical past during the campaign he wouldn’t be the president right now. So he’s looking at paying them back for propping him up and unleashing their attack dogs on Sarah Palin and her family instead.

- JP