Sarah Palin's 'Corrupt Bastards'

Sarah Palin has a term of endearment for mainstream reporters who malign tea party candidates: "corrupt bastards."

Americans to the left of political center don't much trust the objectivity of some new-media giants, such as Fox News and most of AM talk radio. Americans to the right of center, including Palin, don't much trust the old-guard media, including the big three TV networks.

The neither-left-nor-right editorial board of The Colorado Springs Gazette expressed outrage in July, when Fox News and Breitbart.com presented Shirley Sherrod as a racist by isolating comments she made in a speech. Sherrod, former Georgia director for rural development for the federal government, had shared an experience from the 1980s that changed her life. She told of prejudging a farmer and giving him lackluster service because he was white. Then she got to know him and found that he was an ordinary person struggling with poverty. Instead of reporting the wonderful story of enlightenment, Fox and Breitbart showed only a segment of video that featured Sherrod explaining her racially biased treatment of a white man, sans the enlightenment and reconciliation that ensued. It was intentional distortion to manipulate public sentiment.

Now, Alaska CBS affiliate KTVA has been caught conspiring to use contextual misrepresentation to harm U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller, a Yale-educated lawyer who has come to symbolize the tea party's influence.

The assignment editor for the CBS station, Nick McDermott, called Miller's campaign spokesman. When the call went to voice mail, McDermott hung up his iPhone. Or so he thought. The phone didn't hang up and the Miller campaign's voice mail recorded a meeting among McDermott and news staffers plotting sinister coverage of a Miller campaign event:

Female reporter: "I'd wait until you see who showed up because that indicates we already know something."

Female reporter: "Child molesters."

Male reporter: "Oh yeah. Can you repeat Joe Miller's, uh, list of people, campaign workers, which one's the molester?"

Female voice: "We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender."

Male reporter: "You have to find that one person."

Female reporter: "And the one thing we can do is, we won't know, we won't know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a Twitter/Facebook alert saying what-the-hey, 'Joe Miller punched at rally.'"

Female reporter: "Kinda like Rand Paul. I like that."

Female reporter: "That's a good one."

Voice mail system: "End of message, to delete this message..."

A Gallup poll in September found that 57 percent of Americans distrust the mainstream media, a number that has risen 11 percentage points in 12 years. Outrageous conduct, such as the caught-on-tape anti-Miller conspiracy meeting, only feeds conspiracy theories about widespread media bias. There should be hell to pay at KTVA, and journalists throughout the country must demand it.

REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM