Marc Cooper Dishonestly Attacks Newt Gingrich in LAT

Marc Cooper Dishonestly Attacks Newt Gingrich in LAT

By Dave Pierre (Bio | Archive)
June 14, 2009 - 15:02 ET

Unemployment is zooming towards ten percent. The national debt is reaching levels never thought imaginable. And Barack Obama acts more like a celebrity than President. So what's bothering progressive nitwit Marc Cooper? Newt Gingrich!

Cooper's piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Newt Gingrich, zombie politician," is a typical bitter and stale attack on the former House Speaker: He resigned as Speaker "under a cloud of dishonor, disgrace and corruption"; he's remarried and divorced; he received a book advance while still in office. Blah, blah, blah. (His angry piece is hardly different than one that his curmudgeon friend Robert Scheer wrote ten years ago.)

Yet what's even worse is that Cooper can't avoid misleading his readers and failing to present his facts honestly. For example, Cooper writes,

But now, like the living dead, [Gingrich is] back. And his deeply polarizing and frankly fringe rhetoric is unchanged. Sonia Sotomayor is a "racist." Non-Christians are "pagans."

If Cooper wanted to be fair - which apparently he doesn't - he would have included a small note that Gingrich apologized for the "racist" tag on Sotomayor.

And as far claiming that Gingrich said that "non-Christians are 'pagans,'" Gingrich said no such thing. See the video.

The sad thing is that Cooper is supposedly "director of Annenberg Digital News at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism." Apparently his job entails nothing about teaching fairness, honesty and integrity in journalism. What a shame.

Comments Policy

All comments are owned by whoever posted them and are subject to our terms of use. They should not be assumed to represent the views of NewsBusters.

Typical dribble by the

June 14, 2009 - 15:13 ET by bigtimer

Typical dribble by the left...they can't help themselves.

Lying is second nature.

Doubling down on stupid is not a particularly good idea. ~Andrew Breitbart

The MSM fears Gingrich - therefore, they smear him..

June 14, 2009 - 15:55 ET by Gary Hall

If Cooper had wanted to be fair, he'd let the readers in on a little secret - Speaker Gingrich is an active intellectual, deeply involved and working with both sides of the isle on serious issues facing out country.

He often teams up with the opposite side, such as Hillary Clinton, and just a few weeks ago went to the White House with Rev.Sharpton and Mayor Bloomberg and met with Pres. Obama on education policy. The American public, by and large, has never seen any credit given to Gingrich on his critical importance to our country and to bi-partisan politics.

The LA Times, in it's shallow vision, only sees Gingrich as a serious threat to the Democrats and to Obama's agenda. This column is a pre-emptive strike - the paper simply wants this message delivered to it's readers.

Can anyone imagine a paper like the LA Times allowing such a shrill message of hate, by a conservative writer, directed at a Democrat to be published?

The MSM does not want the two sides talking.

Great catch, Dave. (;~> gary

Why are Republicans on the defensive with Sotomayor?

June 14, 2009 - 18:07 ET by tcm22

I'm getting more and more disgusted with Republicans backing away from calling Sotomayor a racist, as if that's somehow off limits.

I can't help but recall how the Dems and their hard-working allies in the press ran Trent Lott out of his leadership role for his comments honoring an old man at a birthday party. If Trent Lott is a racist for complimenting Strom Thurmond on his birthday, then certainly Sotomayor is a racist for claiming her ethnic heritage gives her more wisdom than white men. I find that sickening. The fact that anyone, even on the left, can tolerate that sort of commentary demonstrates the complete lack of principles that govern our political process any more.