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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Sigh. So many pompous year-end retrospective columns about the year’s news and not one of them admitting the four most obvious facts of all

Gee Whiz. Look at all those newspaper columns and TV reports in the past week that review the big stories of the year. Not one of them manages to note any of the four most extraordinary facts about the media in 2013:

1. That every one of the major, hysterically hyped conservative “Scandals” of last year – the Benghazi “cover-up,” The IRS “targeting” of only Tea Party groups, the “hopelessly broken beyond repair” Federal Health Care website — scandals that dominated the headlines for weeks and supposedly exposed the essential evil at the core of the Obama administration – have turned out to be fundamentally bogus. (The only genuine scandal, the one regarding NSA surveillance, is the one in which the conservative media is largely on the side of the government agency involved, not the whistleblowers).
2. That not a single major publication or media outlet in the conservative universe has modified, retracted, corrected or in any way publically conceded errors in their original reporting on the above subjects.
3. That with the exception of the New York Times recent report on Benghazi not a single major publication or media outlet in the mainstream media has devoted anything like equal time to producing updated reports that correct the bogus accusations they originally broadcast than they devoted to the original reporting (No, CBS’s suspension of Lara Logan is not a counter-example. CBS just conceded errors in her specific report, not in their overall coverage).
4. That not one of the major year-end “round-ups” in the mainstream media in the last two weeks has pointed out any of the three facts above.

It really makes you wonder exactly what the coverage would have been like if conservatives were right and the media really was slanted to the left. It’s genuinely hard to imagine how an even more conservative media could be much worse or more unfair.

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