The leftwing blogosphere went into full panic mode Saturday as a result of a tough interview Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden had with a Florida anchorwoman two days ago (video embedded right).
As my colleague P. J. Gladnick previously reported, Barbara West of the ABC TV affiliate WFTV in Orlando gave Biden quite a grilling Thursday.
Yet, despite the obviously favorable and well-documented treatment Barack Obama and his running mate have received from the press during this campaign, Netroots members were shocked and appalled with how Biden was questioned.
Katharine Zaleski, the Senior News Editor at the Huffington Post, published the following Saturday (emphasis added):
Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden gave it to Florida WFTV anchor Barbara West Thursday when she asked him a slew of questions straight out of John McCain's talking points.
West began the interview by asking whether Biden was "embarrassed" by Barack Obama's association with ACORN. Biden refuted the false association between ACORN and Obama and rightly mentioned John McCain's speech during a rally sponsored by ACORN in 2006.
The false association between ACORN and Obama?
Katharine, you're a Senior News Editor for a major online publication, and you haven't read any articles that conclusively connect Obama to ACORN in both his past AND present? Well, I guess that's what it means to be a shill, huh?
Speaking of shills, Ryan Powers at Think Progress was also displeased (emphasis added):
Yesterday, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) sat for an interview with Barbara West of WFTV Orlando. West loaded her interview questions with right-wing smears, likening progressive tax policies to Marxism. Biden responded to West’s ridiculous line of questioning with disbelief.
Powers then played a little sleight of hand with embedded links:
Members of the media criticized West’s unprofessional interview, calling it “embarrassing,” “hostile,” and “ham-handed.”
If you check that first link inside "unprofessional," it goes to a Jake Tapper piece posted at ABCNews's Political Punch. Contrary to Powers' claim, Tapper didn't call the interview "unprofessional." That's actually a quote from the Obama campaign published by the Orlando Sentinel:
"The campaign cited 'an unprofessional interview' WFTV's Barbara West did Thursday with Joe Biden," reports the Orlando Sentinel.
Nice reporting, Ryan.
Unfortunately, that wasn't his only trickery, for the link inside "hostile" goes to a Ben Smith article in which the Politico columnist called this encounter "A highly entertaining, hostile Orlando TV interview with Joe Biden."
I guess the "highly entertaining" aspect was unimportant to Powers.
Finally, the links inside "embarrassing" and "ham-handed" go to the same article by Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel. As such, the only media member Powers could find that was outraged by West's interview was a little-known columnist from a paper with a daily circulation of 226,000.
Nice work, Ryan.
Of course, someone had to post something about this at Daily Kos. Not surprisingly, it's received over 1,000 comments:
This is a wonderful bit of video, stunning in its total expression of the right-wing and their tools in the media.
Pay particular attention to how these geniuses can't even get the call sign for this television station right:
The woman is Orlando WFT tv anchorwoman Barbara West.
Close. It's actually WFTV. But the fun just begins there, for then the commenters started getting it even wronger:
Very appropriate that their station letters
at first glance look like "wtf"My exact thoughts - WTF?!
These morons have been bleating their own lies so long they have started to believe them. Dumb as a fencepost.Nice to see that the campaign has pulled their access. These idiots in the right wing media are about to discover that they have REALLY pissed off the next administration, and WTF-TV is going to need access to the administration a hell of a ot more than the administration is going to need access to WTF-TV and their lunatic automaton newsreaders.
I hope the campaign has been keeping a list of the tools like this bimbot.
What should you expect given that one of their heroes thinks "JOBS" is a three-letter word?
In the end, this is what comes of the atrocious job the Obama-loving media have done since the junior senator from Illinois first tossed his name into the ring back in February 2007.
Now, anything less than the sycophantic gushing and fawning we've been exposed to lo these past 21 months and his followers think a law has been broken.
In the immortal words of Fats Domino, "Ain't That a Shame?"
