Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Readers Know What an "Investigative Report" Is

Once upon a time, when I worked for the local metro daily, I did a stint in Business News as general dog's body, which meant I did everything from the menial (answering phones) to scrolling the wires (for the wire guy), editing pages, and occasionally writing stories.

Business News is the only conservative section of any newspaper, I can assure you. You know all those studies that show some tiny minority of journalists are Republicans? They're almost all located in Business News. I could theorize why that is, but it's not terribly important for this post.

One of the first things I learned when I transferred into Business News was that you had a different type of customer calling to complain. Whereas your typical complaint in Sports was about a missing box score for the Itasca Wampus Cats, and your typical Entertainment caller wanted to know how old Phyllis Diller is (she's 89), people call Business News when they are mad at a business and want an investigative report done about it.

"Readers know what an investigative report is," I was told by one reporter. "They know you'll be dropping a sack of shit on somebody."

Well, the unbiased New York Times is planning to drop a flaming sack on Rupert Murdoch. How do we know it will be a dump job? Well, to start with, they're putting a number of reporters and editors on the "secret" project. Generally, if a story is no big deal, you'll have one or two reporters and maybe one editor devoting some time and attention to it. When you assemble a staff for a project, it's only when they're planning to sling some mud.

Tammy Bruce asked the big question: If the NYT is merely interested in media manipulation, politicking, and malfeasance, when will they do an investigative report on George Soros?

The answer is "never" especially when the "investigation" you launch into is actually nothing more than you doing the bidding of the man you should be investigating--George Soros. Murdoch, as an example, has not declared himself the messiah, he has never publicly declared that he intends to spend his fortune on seating or unseating an American president, nor has he been found guilty of Insider Trading by a government. Funny enough, though, it's not Soros they're interested in, who has done all those things. Gee, I wonder why.

The NYT has indeed launched a massive "investigation" into Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and one does have to, shall I say, question the timing. Gee, as we launch into presidential campaigns, the Dems try to shut out Fox News from debates and coverage, and now the completely independent, absolutely not an organ for the Soros Gestapo, decides, in today's world or war and terrorism, that the most important person they should spend enormous resources on "investigating" is...Murdoch.

But it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with partisan politics and the desire to shut down a venue that offers a hearing for alternative ideas and voices. Alternative from the leftist status quo, that is. No conflict of interest there as television's coverage of the news continues to eat away at newspaper circulation. Nope, nothing to see here folks except a publicly held company working to undermine what they see as a political/business/philosophical rival.

The voices on the left have risen into a shrieking crescendo over FOX News, talk radio, and conservative speech in general. But take my word for it, nothing makes their blood boil like the wild success of FOX News. It's interesting that liberals run nearly every media outlet in the country but they are determined to silence conservatives who have the audacity to prefer straight or conservative news to the liberal garbage they were forcefed for years. More from Bruce:
Why are the Left and the Dems desperate to silence Fox News? And make no mistake--this is what this is all about. They know they need opposing voices to be silenced if they are to gain power in this nation. They have no hope of doing so as long as talk radio, the internet and the one television channel that allows non-leftist opinion to be heard, operate freely. Whether it be bringing back the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," or public campaigns to marginalize programming and radio hosts, or boycott campaigns to destroy sponsorship, or so-called investigations meant to intimidate and destroy, the goals are all the same--silence opposing viewpoints, silence those who do not pay allegiance to the Soros/Leftist Gestapo.

Hopefully, readers still know what an "investigative report" is.