CNBC: “On Many Issues” Dean “Centrist,” But Lauer: Too Liberal?

Media Research Center ^ | August 6, 2003 | Brent Baker

[OESY]

CNBC: “On Many Issues” Dean “Centrist,” But Lauer: Too Liberal?

Monday night on CNBC, David Shuster delivered another effort to portray Howard Dean as less than liberal. On the News with Brian Williams, Shuster contended: “On many issues, Dean is a centrist. He supports the death penalty, gun ownership and balanced budgets." As if supporting massive new spending and further government intervention into peoples’ lives makes you a centrist so long as you raise taxes to pay for it and, therefore, maintain a balanced budget.

But Shuster’s story did go on to recount how competitors Joe Lieberman and John Kerry are calling Dean too liberal to win a general election, thus showing how much of the national media are the left of the Democratic field.

And on Tuesday’s Today, during an interview with Dean, Matt Lauer asked Dean to respond to Lieberman and Kerry and actually took Dean on from the right, squeezing in this question at the very end of the segment: “Ten seconds left. Are you too liberal to win the general election?"

These approaches to Dean follow recent efforts by other outlets to disguise his liberalness. The August 4 CyberAlert recounted: Before former Vermont Governor Howard Dean can be painted as a far-left ideologue, the national media are coming to his aide, penning stories about how he’s not only not liberal, he’s really a conservative. “He remains a fiscal conservative,” declared a New York Times story last Wednesday. Then on Sunday, the front page of the Washington Post carried this unequivocal headline: “As Governor, Dean Was Fiscal Conservative.” In Time, John Cloud argued that “the truth” is that Dean “is a rock-ribbed budget hawk, a moderate on gays and guns, and a true lefty on only a few issues.” Cloud insisted that “Dean, who has been compared so often to George McGovern and Ralph Nader, is far more like George W. Bush.” Cloud’s evidence: Dean’s patrician upbringing in a Republican family who “belonged to the super-exclusive Maidstone golf club, which for decades had no minority or Jewish members.”

For details: www.mediaresearch.org

[OESY]

Who'da thunk it?

[goldstategop]

The liberal media can lie for them but we aren't going to let them get away with it. The days when John F., Poco Loco and Nikita Dean could pretend they aren't liberals, is over.