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According to this libtard I work with, it is because Americans aren’t interested in the truth.

Sigh . . .

Tell him/her that

Journalists are all selling the idea that the news that they know from the newswire but which you haven't heard/read yet is important. And most of the time, most of the news is unimportant and will soon be forgotten.

Journalists claim to be objective, or at least that all other journalists are objective (which, if those other journalists make the same claim, is the same thing).

The only way to even attempt to be objective is to start out with an analysis of any reasons you might have to want to believe what you do.

Journalists never point out their need to make the news seem more important than it usually is - or any other tendency which inheres in their business model.

Therefore journalists' claims to objectivity are a fraud.

People who ignore or heavily discount so-called "objective" news evince far more interest in the truth than people who passively follow the story line of the journalist.

Massive Cuts at ABC News; 300-400 Positions to be Eliminated
TV Newser ^ | Feb. 23, 2010 | Chris Ariens

Improving the political discourse resides in the hands of the political majority. Thus far, they have proven themselves unable or (more likely) unwilling to do so. Their rage is rote, not real, and it does none of us any good.
What the writer leaves unsaid, and what I consistently insist on making explicit, is that the Democrats are able to get mileage out that tired tripe, whereas the Republicans cannot, and seldom or never even try it. For the simple reason that the Democratic Party exists in symbiosis with Big Journalism. It now amazes me to realize how long it took me to even identify that fact, let alone analyze the obvious reasons for it.
Big Journalism is in the business of selling the "sizzle" of objectivity and important information - and delivering the "steak" of pandering to our jealousy and base instincts. They claim the mantle of "the public interest" when they are merely delivering superficial and negative fluff systematically designed only to interest the public - which a different matter entirely. Big Journalism can be understood and referred to as a single entity for the simple reason that the newspapers were homogenized by the economics of the Associated Press, membership in which is expensive and the value of which must therefore be maximized. In consequence of which, the various organs of Big Journalism are like the various teams of Major League Baseball - competitive is delivering their product, but cooperative in promoting that product. It is always essentially the same product. So it it nothing to marvel at when journalists say that journalism is objective - of course they would say that. But that claim is self-negating, for the simple reason that subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity, and subjectivity is nothing other than a belief in one's own objectivity.
So the question is not "Why would journalism be in symbiosis with the Democratic Party," the only question is why a politician would not be in symbiosis with journalism. So it appears that the Republican Party, flawed as it is, must actually have some principle which separates it from the symbiosis with journalism which is enjoyed by Democrat politicians.
Rote Rage: My Two Cents on Tempering the Debate Spare Change | 28 March 2010 | David J. Aland

Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.

If you think about it at all, you realize that the only way to attempt to be objective is to declare up front all the reasons why you might not be objective.
And that implies that anyone who claims to be objective - i.e., journalists as we have known them all our lives - is not even trying to be objective.
Are there any reasons why journalists might not be objective? Of course - every business has its own interests. Some of the well-known interests of journalism are:

the need for public credulity, including the need for public credulity of journalism's claims of objectivity,

the need to interest the public. The rules which journalists claim to be objective are actually rules to promote their own business by interesting the public.

If it bleeds, it leads
"'Man Bites Dog' not 'Dog Bites Man."
"There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper" (i.e., "meet your deadline, tell the story first").

If journalists declared those interests before reporting their stories, they would be more objective. But, superficially, they might seem less so. And journalism - after all, the root "jour" is French for "day" - is about "what's happening now" rather than about perspective and the big picture.
The Associated Press and the rest of the wire services are useful to exploit scarce communication bandwidth. The wire services homogenize journalism, suppressing the individuality which was originally the hallmark of American newspapers. That homogenization does not make newspapers less tendentious - it magnifies the inherent tendency of the journalist to self-hype. Such individuality as is expressed in the editorial/op ed pages merely serves to "position" the rest of the newspaper (chiefly wire service material) as being objective.
The Internet is an expression of the technological fact that bandwidth now is very plentiful. The internet exposes the homogenization of journalism via wire services as the Nineteenth Century anachronism that it is.
The "objective journalism" emperor has no clothes, and no one in journalism can say so. Although I as an individual FReeper cannot drive that fact into the public discourse, via the internet I can publish it in a form which is accessible worldwide. It is up to talk radio and other opinion leaders to pick up the ball and run with it.

Once dispose of the baseless assumption that journalism is objective, and the idea of having journalists moderate televised political debates becomes risible. Dispense with that assumption, and the question becomes whether, and to what extent, politicians align themselves with the tendencies of journalism. And the answer becomes plain as the nose on your face.
Journalists assign positive labels to those who do align themselves with the interests of journalism, and negative labels to those who do not. I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:

objective :
reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)

liberal :
see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
progressive :
see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
moderate:
see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
centrist :
see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").

conservative :
rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")

right-wing :
see, "conservative."

Original FR post

Speaking to liberal NPR host Diane Rehm, Carter put forth that "public broadcasting networks on radio and television basically tell the honest, objective truth.
Attempting objectivity is an admirable pursuit, but one which must begin with and a self-critical examination of the reasons one might not be objective. Joining a clique of other journalists who all swear to each other's objectivity - or uncritically broadcasting the praise of a sympathetic political figure, is no way to attempt objectivity.
Self-proclaimed "objective" journalists aren't even trying to be objective. They are heavily biased.

And, I think, the Republicans who (want funding for public broadcasting cut) would like for everybody to have one channel that they can watch every day, and that's Fox News."
Naturally any politician, Republican or Democrat, would prefer that the public listen only to the broadcasts which are most sympathetic to him/her self. But in fact, while Fox News is uniquely sympathetic to Republicans, NPR is far from unique in being sympathetic to Democrats. The reason Air America failed so signally is transparent - the niche it sought to fill was already full of "objective" journalists. Who are even more tendentious than Air America could be, since claiming objectivity is an extreme of tendentiousness.

Jimmy Carter Gone Wild
Townhall.com ^ | December 4, 2010 | Bill O'Reilly

This proves that smarta$$ is not a journalist but a liberal propagandist, which means he is simply a very subtle, useful tool of left-wing propagandists, an "advance party" if you will.

I like your post.
But I have a quibble about language. You say, "smarta$$ is not a journalist," but then you say, "[he is] a liberal propagandist, which means he is simply a very subtle, useful tool of left-wing propagandists, an "advance party" if you will. "

My point is simply that the wire services in general and the Associated Press in particular united journalism around the self-interest of journalism itself. Journalism is just talk, and

the self interest of journalism is that its talk is taken to be more important than the action taken by others to provide food, clothing, shelter, security, energy, and so forth.
This explains why journalism is able to maintain the fatuous conceit of its own objectivity, despite the obvious realtity that journalism is at most part of the truth, and "Half the truth is often a great lie." You can print "both sides of the story" without necessarily getting at the truth of the matter, and that happens all the time. Because the perspective of the journalist defines what he thinks the two sides of the story are. Which may be irrelevant to what is actually going on. And the very fact that the journalist claims to be objective (or, what is the same thing, suffers others to claim it for him) proves that the journalist is not even trying to be objective.
Ironically, it is possible to attempt to be objective only by being open about any reasons why you might not be objective. And claiming to be objective is the very opposite of scrupulously examining your own motives and being open about how they (inevitably) influence your perspective. Therefore,

no "objective journalist" is even trying to actually be objective.
It would be wonderful if we could count on objective information for the mere price of a newspaper. Alas, it is impossible. There can be no substitute for exercising your own judgement. "Anyone who tells you anything else is selling something."
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith

Because the wire services unified journalism, journalism speaks with a single voice (I discount the editorial pages as being a peripheral issue, which function primarily to "position" the rest of the newspaper as being objective). Since journalism speaks with a single voice, there are natural propaganda advantages to agreeing with that unified journalistic voice. So if you don't have any principles other than your own self interest, the path of least resistance is to become a politician who promotes whatever the journalistic voice finds convenient. You can then count on that journalistic voice to give you favorable labels and give your opposition consistently unfavorable PR.

So when you say someone is a propagandist rather than a journalist, you give undue credit to journalism as a profession. Journalism is propaganda.
Is Cain Able? (refreshingly honest about not knowing but..)
HeyMiller ^ | Monday June 6, 2011 | John Miller
The Right to Know

There was a swipe at journalistic objectivity: “You cannot be objective when it comes to right and wrong, and Israel is in the right. So I’m a biased journalist and I’m having a great time doing it.” Breitbart Dishes on Gingrich, Weiner, Palin The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles ^ | June 13, 2011 | Jonah Lowenfeld
You cannot be objective, period. But you can try to approximate it. But to do so you must make a serious effort to identify, openly, the reasons why you are not objective in a particular case.
That is, you must make statements against your own interest. And it is that which a journalist cannot do while at one and the same time claiming actually to be - or even allowing others to describe him as - objective.
The case is precisely the opposite of Yodda's dictum, "Do or do not. There is no 'try'." We need, therefore, a word which defines one who is actually trying to be objective - but who, in the nature of things, cannot claim or allow others to claim actual objectivity for himself. And there is a word which was coined in ancient Greece essentially for that purpose.
sophist 1542, earlier sophister (c.1380), from L. sophista, sophistes, from Gk. sophistes, from sophizesthai "to become wise or learned," from sophos "wise, clever," of unknown origin. Gk. sophistes came to mean "one who gives intellectual instruction for pay," and, contrasted with "philosopher," it became a term of contempt. Ancient sophists were famous for their clever, specious arguments. philosopher O.E. philosophe, from L. philosophus, from Gk. philosophos "philosopher," lit. "lover of wisdom," from philos "loving" + sophos "wise, a sage." "Pythagoras was the first who called himself philosophos, instead of sophos, 'wise man,' since this latter term was suggestive of immodesty." [Klein]

I admit that the Greeks were discussing "wisdom" rather than "objectivity," but then - is there any substantive difference between the words? Is there any such thing as "unwise objectivity?" Or "non-objective wisdom?" I suggest there is more of a distinction than a difference - and that, etymologically at least, "philosopher" is the word most descriptive of "a person who is trying, not to merely to seem but actually to be, objective."

Isn’t it amazing what the media lets the left get away with!

It might be surprising - if there were any reason to suppose that journalism actually was objective, as it claims. But then, the very claim of objectivity is proof that journalists aren't even trying to be objective.
If they were trying to be objective they would be declaring their interests, not claiming not to have any interests.
If they were trying to be objective they would admit that they make their money less by informing the public and promoting virtue than by flattering the public in its ignorance, and pandering to the public in its vices.
If they were trying to be objective they would condemn the Democratic Party for pandering to the public's sloth and greed, rather than promoting the Democratic Party for acting on precisely the same impulses which now rule journalism.

Jeopardy! clue:
The Associated Press

Correct Jeopardy! response:
Who is the man behind the curtain?

The AP invented "objective journalism" as we know it. But if someone calls a wise man "wise," the wise man distances himself from that accolade for fear of being arrogant. In the same way, if someone calls a person who is trying to be objective "objective," the person who is trying to be objective will distance himself from that claim because it is impossible to associate oneself with a claim of actual objectivity and simultaneously to take full account of the reasons why it is impossible to know that one is being objective.
It follows that "objective" journalists aren't even trying be objective. Nor is anyone who agrees that journalism is objective actually trying to be objective - else, they would not risk the association: He is objective, and I agree with him, therefore I am objective.
OTOH there is no conflict between being openly "conservative" and trying to be objective. Being openly conservative entails having the humility to admit that your perspective has a legitimate label which is not the name of a virtue.
"Wisdom" and "objectivity" are virtues, but there are other virtues in the American political context. Consider "liberal" (which only became an euphemism for socialist in the 1920s, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary). "Progressive" (one of the objectives of the Constitution is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts") is another. "Moderate" (a.k.a. "centrist") is a classical virtue like wisdom. I submit that the list of American political virtues is coextensive with the list of euphemisms journalists have applied to socialists.
The great problem of countering propaganda in America is the fact that journalism has been homogenized by the AP. And that the public has been propagandized, for generations, to take for granted that journalism is objective. It is surprisingly difficult to think past that propaganda:
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
We should turn the question around and ask, "Why would journalists want to be objective?" Not why they would want to be perceived as being objective, which is obvious, but why they would want to undergo the rigors of actually trying - against human nature - to discount their own perspective and risk validating uncongenial viewpoints?
The answer to that question is, for most people, the challenge of competition. "Conservatives" - the label is actually uncongenial to the advocates of liberty who get smeared with it in America - are consistently challenged whenever they make a significant claim. In that environment, there is a real reason to "get your ducks in a row" before making a public statement. Unfortunately for the Republic, the homogenizing influence of wire service journalism means that whatever is convenient/congenial to the journalist as such will never be challenged by anyone else in journalism.
If journalism is simply following the path of its own internal least resistance, why does that result in agreement with socialists and dogged, persistent criticism of any opponent of socialists? Socialism is simply the denigration of anyone who takes responsibility to work to a bottom line. It is the taking for granted of the fruit of all the labors of those who actually work and make decisions in the face of risk. It promotes the critic above "the man in the arena," and criticism is precisely the role of the journalist. There is an inherent synergism between journalists and political socialists.

Graneros: There you have it. Because the MSM and the Dems in are full attack mode against the Tea Party it can only mean the Tea Party is successful beyond anything anyone thought possible and that the Dems are very scared of them. Reading the news in the new bizzaro world of the USA means whatever they say you can count on the opposite being true.

That isn't anything new. It traces back to the post-Civil War era which is also the founding era of wire service journalism.

News Over the Wires:
The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim
points out that the Associated Press was challenged for blatantly accruing centralized propaganda power. The Associated Press's response was to point out that the newspapers which made up the membership of the AP were (at that time, and traditionally) notorious for not agreeing on much of anything. So the AP itself was objective. We see how that worked out; now the news outlets, broadcast as well as print, are notorious for agreeing about everything.
This, IMHO, is the logical consequence of the need of the news organizations for national and international news which only the wire services could provide, and the lack of which dooms a news organization to the ghetto of strictly local reporting. That suppressed openly opinionated/partisan journalism, but it empowered the inherent tendency of journalists to promote their own importance, now no longer checked by competition among journalism outlets. All report the same stuff, from the same sources, according to the same criteria - so the individuality among them is expressed only in distinctions not actual differences.
The criteria - "Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man," "If it bleeds, it leads," and "Always make your deadline" - are obviously designed to interest the public (for profit), and have nothing to do with the public interest (informing people on matters of importance). The lack of competition among journalists has led to a lack of introspection within journalism - the only concern among journalists is for the conformity which they confuse with objectivity. Journalists make no effort to be objective in fact. Any actual attempt at objectivity would be incompatible with claiming - or even associating with those who claim for them - that they actually are objective.
Compare with the similar conundrum recognized by the ancient Greeks - any attempt at actual wisdom must start by limiting one's self to claiming to love wisdom (see, philosopher) rather than claiming to actually be wise (see, sophist, origin of our term for slippery argumentation, sophistry).
Journalists "don't plant 'taters, they don't plant cotton" - but let the crop or either fail, and they can always make a buck complaining about the failures of others. Second guessing is cheap talk, and that is the specialty of journalism. And the extreme of cheap talk is socialism. It is no accident that Lenin was a writer and Mussolini was a reporter/editor - the idea that critics rather than doers should run things is naturally congenial to writers.

So journalists and writers are naturally attracted to socialism, which puts critics in charge. And what, therefore, could be more natural than for ambitious politicians to attach themselves to the natural propensity and predilection of journalism, and thereby to avail themselves of the propaganda wind that places at their backs?
In short, nothing could be more natural than that politicians should align themselves with journalism, and that journalism should reciprocate by assigning positive labels to their political allies. The result we observe is that there is no example of a virtue ("moderation" a.k.a. "centrism" being a classical virtue, and "progress" and "liberty" being American virtues) which has not been used as a label for the allies of journalism. Reciprocally, opposition to socialism gets labeled "conservative" (opposite to the American virtue of a belief in progress), "extreme," or "right wing."
In reality "liberals" do not promote liberty, "progressives" do not promote progress by the people (but only by an encroaching central government), and "moderates" are merely soft-spoken allies of the above rather than holding positions not simpatico to journalism. In reality "objective" journalists, like their "liberal/progressive/moderate" allies, are systematic perpetrators of sophistry. Which explains why we have so much work to do deconstructing the endemic distortions we find in "objective news."
Journalism and Objectivity

There is a theory of personal interaction known as “transactional analysis.” That theory holds that there is in all of us a “child” personna, and “adult” personna, and a “parent” personna. Thus, an interaction can be reciprocally “child to child” - which is being playful or humorous. An interaction can be reciprocally “adult to adult” - being serious. And an interaction can be reciprocally “parent to parent” - being judgmental of others.
Or an interaction can also legitimately be reciprocally “parent to child” - i.e., a real parent to a real child, in which correction is given and accepted, or reciprocally “parent to adult” or “adult to child” in which moral or factual instruction is given and accepted.

But things are different when an interaction is not reciprocal; in those cases neither person accepts the role the other is assigning them. And the most problematic of all is when each person tries to assume the role of “parent” while assigning the other person the role of “child.” That is when the sparks can really fly.

In reality the conservative generally tries to relate “adult to adult” with others, being pragmatic and doing what will work in the long run. But the reality which this satire illustrates is that journalists, not distinguishably from “liberals,” who can take on the role of journalist and be accepted by other journalists without skipping a beat, systematically assume the role of “parent” and assign the role of “child” to conservatives. That is actually a temptation for everyone, and is the natural result of a person simply because they have the power to be able to maintain that position. That temptation is tempered by the existence of countervailing power.

The problem conservatives have had since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary is that journalism has been unified and homogenized by the wire services. Thus, the inherent craving for attention, respect, and authority of people in general is magnified in the journalist because nobody with the same propaganda power as the journalist wants to burst the journalist’s bubble and point out that the journalist is a mere critic, and that “the man in the arena” deserves pride of place. Thus, socialism is the natural outgrowth of the hypertrophy of the “critic” what in transaction analysis is the “parent” role of journalism.

The larger problem stems from the fact that most journalists have not been taught to critically examine statistics. They follow the herd which often means that they report numbers without providing readers a context for making sense of those numbers.

Seriously, does anyone expect anything different from journalists?

. . . and if so, why?
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
We need not wonder if journalists "meet together;" the critical mass of journalists work for members of the Associated Press - if not, indeed, for the AP itself. And it is scarcely to be thought that journalists of the other wire services, or of no wire service, are out of the loop.
The effect of the wire services is to homogenize journalism and inspire a herd mentality among journalists. And it hardly seems likely, on the evidence I'm aware of, that journalism school does anything to reduce the herd tendency of journalists; instead it teaches journalism on the Associated Press model. As long as journalism as a whole is able to hype the importance of "The News," and hype the "objectivity" of journalists as such, there will be overwhelming herd behavior among journalists.
The herd behavior of journalists cultivates herd "thought" among we-the-people. Who among us has not been taught in Civics class that journalism is objective? There are however problems with this simple story: to have government schools teaching that journalists are objective essentially establishes journalists as a priesthood who have different rights and responsibilities than the general public, and Journalists are not without their own distinctive motivations separate from the public interest - pecuniary self-interest, and ego gratification implicit in being considered influential. Of course monetary and ego gratification are universal human desires - but their presence in journalism does not indicate that journalists are a priesthood apart from we-the-people.
Not only so, but because disasters for the public at large produce "great copy" for the journalist (who works overtime covering wars and natural disasters), it is apparent that to the first-order approximation journalists have perverse incentives. Without claiming that as a general rule journalists intentionally cause calamities in order to report them, it has to be said that William Randolph Hearst "exercised enormous political influence, and is sometimes credited with pushing public opinion in the United States into a war with Spain in 1898," according to Wikipedia This suggests, in considering the claims of journalistic objectivity, the advisability of heeding the cautioning of Adam Smith:
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. -

We would do well to consider what journalism's self-proclamation of its own "objectivity" actually implies in the context of what we would expect of any ordinary person who claimed to even attempt objectivity. For any ordinary person, we would expect that they would declare up front all their interests in the case at hand which would hinder their attempted objectivity. But that, of course, is precisely what the journalists are too busy claiming actual objectivity to ever do.
Besides, to the extent that claiming "objectivity" is code for claiming wisdom, the claim is sheer sophistry.

The advent of wire services transformed journalism. I say "services, plural, but the Associated Press is the big one. And the AP has always sought a monopoly position - to the extent that SCOTUS held, back in 1945, that the AP was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
But even if you ignore that salient fact and assume that there is in fact competition between multiple wire services, the fact remains that any wire service would tend to homogenize journalism. For the simple reason that any wire service is expensive, and any newspaper which belongs to a wire service must maximize the public respect for wire service reports.
Any wire service provides a newspaper with plentiful "copy" - reports of events which would not, in the pre-telegraph world, have been known to the public at great distances from the event for weeks or months. It is not the telegraph company which does that, tho. The reports have the mystique of the telegraph, and it takes a leap of imagination to absorb just how magical it seemed when, in the mid-Eighteenth Century, the telegraph made instantaneous communication possible over distances which then required weeks or even months for human transportation to reach.
But it is the wire service - reporters, who send the stories over the wire- who actually produce the reports. And the reporters are still just people. The member newspapers of the Associated Press, and the AP itself, generate the reports and those reports are the common source for all stories each newspaper publishes about distant events. How would it be possible for that system to fail to homogenize the member newspapers? That would not be possible. There still exist various editorial page positions of the various newspapers - the Wall Street Journal is a salient example, and its editorial page sells newspapers. But in general the editorial page is essentially a ghetto if it differs from the political coloration of the common reportage of the (nominally various) inputs to the AP. The meat and potatoes
The natural question is, "What is the inherent political coloration of the generic reporter? What is the difference between a reporter and other professionals?" The answer to that question, IMHO, is that journalists are biased in favor of journalism. Journalism is talk, not action, and journalism is uniquely flighty in its subjects. It doesn't restrict itself to any particular subject, but dedicates itself to whatever promotes journalism itself. And since criticism of those upon whom the public depends makes journalism seem important, the bias of journalism is against the public image of important institutions. But since this bias creates a propaganda wind, politicians sail down that wind if that does not violate their principles. Politicians who do this are rewarded by journalism with positive labels such as "progressive," "liberal," or "moderate." OTOH politicians who defend the institutions upon which we depend are tarred with negative labels such as "right wing," "extreme," or "conservative."
Oh - and by the way, they award the positive label "objective" exclusively to themselves and not to the "liberal"/"moderate"/"progressive" person who is not a working as a journalist - notwithstanding the fact that there is no difference between the attitude of a "liberal" and that of an "objective" journalist. The claim of objectivity is a claim to represent the public interest - which is a great way to promote oneself and one's profession. And no journalist will contradict you if you assert that journalism is objective. But considering that any attempt at actual objectivity must start with an open declaration of any interests which one has in favor of any party to a dispute, declaring oneself/one's own profession to be "objective" precludes any real attempt at objectivity by the journalist.

Half the truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin Franklin/tt>

The filmmakers use real footage of Couric and then cut in Julianne Moore's fake Palin. Other reviews note that Steve Schmidt's actual Palin-trashing, "Game Change" book-promoting interview on "60 Minutes" is the exclamation point at the end of the film. HBO is merging their leftist "docudrama" with real liberal-bias "news" clips to leave one unmissable point: Never vote for Sarah Palin. Ever. For anything.

HBO wants to paint the Democrats as the valiant heroes and paint the Republicans as the paranoid crazy women. Nobody needs to wait until March to wonder whether HBO is ridiculous when it puts out a statement calling this movie “a balanced portrayal of the McCain/Palin campaign."
Asserting that Mr. Obama is a better president than Gov. Palin would be is, however incorrect by my lights, merely free speech. However, there is a line which HBO is oblivious to and has blithely crossed - a line between opinion, on the one hand, and reckless disregard of the truth with intent to cause harm to someone, on the other. One thing to say, even to dramatize, the opinion that John McCain “knew” that Palin was paying “too much” attention to Rush Limbaugh. But when they mix real footage with dramatization, and even more when they advertise their hit job as "a balanced portrayal of the McCain/Palin campaign,” IMHO they have set themselves up for a lawsuit. If Governor Palin isn’t running for political office this year, she could do a great deal of good by suing HBO and the Associated Press and its membership for their very socks.
Why the Associated Press? Because HBO would rely on the hit jobs of the AP and its membership in order to claim that they had reason to believe that it was OK to make the claims that they did. And because (back in 1945) the AP was found by SCOTUS to be a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust law. The AP is the central culprit, because it provides cover for the rest of the publicity machine. The AP and its membership also subjects all our politicians to its flattery (“liberals,” “moderates,” “progressives”) and derision (“right wing,” “conservative). It was the AP and its membership which pushed through the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold “law.” And it is the AP and its membership which profits (in increased effectiveness of its flattery and derision) by it.

HBO's Palin Pollution
Townhall.com | February 24, 2012 | Brent Bozell