ABC's Nightline reported that "both sides" are airing "mudslinging" campaign ads, yet Nightline could not point to a single Democratic example
In a report on the ad wars of the 2006 midterm elections, co-anchor Terry Moran reported on the October 25 broadcast of ABC's Nightline that "both sides are playing a serious game of hardball" with "mudslinging" attack ads hitting "below the belt." Moran wondered, "How low can they go?" Despite Moran's insistence that the "low punches" were being thrown by both Democrats and Republicans, the entire Nightline report focused on a handful of controversial Republican commercials -- including ads being aired in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and New York -- that have garnered wide media attention and been broadly condemned, both for their inaccuracies and their ugly personal attacks. Moran's report provided no examples of Democratic-sponsored attack ads being aired that match the level of distortion and personal attack found in the Republican commercials.
The Nightline broadcast followed an earlier ABC News report posted online that also addressed negative campaign ads. As Media Matters for America noted, despite focusing exclusively on the string of "ugly" and "nasty" Republican smear commercials, the ABC piece, like the Nightline report, insisted that "Democrats aren't necessarily running clean campaigns." Unable to cite any current examples however, ABC simply stated, "As the races tighten in the next couple of weeks, the left will likely unleash its garbage as well."
Disney really has it in for Democrats.
Its hatefilled , lying "Path to 9/11" and now this lie from Nightline.
Republicans are the ones who play the fear game and use racist ads.
With Mark Halperin as the Political News Director is there any wonder that this Neo-Con Operative would like to associate Republican filth to Democratic politics?
When Larry Holmes fought Jerry Cooney everybody wanted the great white hope to win, they didn't care that Jerry was hitting below the belt 40-50 times a round, and that the Richard Steele never deducted a point until the 8th round.
The Republicans want everbody to think if they do it obviously the Democrats do, so it must be alright, exept when it's done to Republicans.
Its like the Teenager Party!!
Happy Thoughts;
Dan Grady
P.S. : The boxing anology was a opportunity to jibe the worst Referee in boxing history.
The Path to 9/11 was based on lies, it never happened that way. It was Conservative Propaganda. This has been documented on MMFA in early September go back and read the archives.
ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG, that was priceless. Thanks for the laugh.
Perhaps you should brush up over at freeperville.
Blaze you say: The Path to 9/11 was not hatefilled. Really? Lying about President Clinton doesnt have a hatefilled basis?
I see your back to trolling and spewing garbage without having any facts to back it up. These facts have been backed up, I am not the one who needs to repost them, this is old news Blaze.
Disney has it out for Democrats? So I guess Brian Ross who works for ABC and exposed the Mark Foley Pervert was going against his bosses
I dont know what your point is.
Also nice change in your username. Either you were banned last week for you attacks toward me or you have changed your name. Either way you are a bitter Conservative who is also an apologist for the MSM and its tilt toward Bushie.
Using Brian Ross as a balance to the growing right-wing bias at ABC is simply ludicrous. Investigative journalism exposes powerful people in corrupt situations, both left and right. It's the right that's in power and the Repub leadership that's doing the coverup in the Foley case.
And the overwhelming majority of vile political ads are coming from the Repubs. Period.
that some neocons will point to this same Nightline broadcast as proof of liberal bias. After all, they "admit" that the Democrats are just as bad, but they only highlight some bad apples among the Republicans.
Spooky, huh?
Of course not, it is all in the eye of the beholder.
The reason that Nightline did not provide any examples of negative campaign ads by the Democrats is because they are not doing what the Republicans are doing.
As we've seen countless times, because the Republicans would run negative ads in a desperate attempt to rally their base, they assume that Democrats would do the same because the Republicans are so close minded that they cannot comprehend someone thinking in an alternative way.
That is a characteristic of rightwingers, including George Bush. He is closed minded, and cannot grasp that there might be alternatives to his way of thinking. He stands his ground, even if it's clear that he is making America stand on quicksand!
Is that this morning on Fox News, they actually acted like they were trying to have a reasonable discussion about the Tennessee ad attacking Harold Ford. The news reporter, a woman I did not recognize, was talking about how the ad was offensive to her. They actually had Eleanor Clift on there to talk about it.
The things that made it clear that it was happening on Fox News were twofold. First, they replayed the ad - they gave it more free airtime. Secondly, they stopped that ad before it was done. They showed the early part of the ad, but did not show the part that is the most offensive, where the young, attractive white woman tells Harold Ford to call her in a seductive way. The worst part of the ad was left on the cutting room floor, so that those people who think that liberals overreact will not have that opinion challenged by this blatantly offensive portion of that ad.
So, when I was listening to Fox News earlier, they misleadingly only played a part of the offensive ad from Tennessee.
Just now, they were supposed to play another clip on another story, and by some stroke of bad luck, they "accidentally" played that same clip over again. And, imagine this.... the news reporter did not stop the clip, and the news producer in the control room, did not stop the clip until it ran all the way through the same first part of that ad, all the way up until the guy says "haven't we ALL gotten money from porn movie makers?"
So, they gave free airtime to the ad again!
When news shows accidentally play the wrong tape, they typically stop it after just a couple of seconds. This one played the same clip that had played earlier, and did not stop it until it had played the same amount as earlier.
Coincidence? Innocent mistake? I think not.
Can't you see? This is the Equal-time rule in action!
On Oct. 23rd, ABC News' Halperin said to Sean Hannity, "we've got to not be perceived as liberal".
We're seeing ABC put Halperin's philosophy into practice already.
Tell that new policy to Brian Ross for exposing Mark Foley.
You just said that Brian Ross exposing a sexual predator is evidence of liberal bias?
Brian Ross exposing a Congressman, something the Republican leadership in the House should have done years before, is evidence of liberal bias?
Talking about the truth, exposing reality, uncovering a cover-up, is evidence of bias? Brian Ross was, I guess, biased towards telling the truth, and exposing the truth, and making sure the public knows the facts.
His exposE shone a light on a sexual predator. Because he documented the salacious emails, we found out about the IM's, and the grooming this guy was doing, so that he could get his rocks off talking to pages and ex-pages before they turned 18 and have sex with them after they turned 18. He was supposed to be a mentor and supervisor to these kids, and was not supposed to be trying to seduce them. Several kids never consented to his advances and were quite upset by them, even some that were not too over the top - that's how bad he was.
So, Brian Ross exposes the truth, and that shows a liberal bias?
Thanks for admitting that the truth has a liberal bias.
It's because the truth has a liberal bias that the rightwingers claimed for years that the media had a liberal bias. It's because the truth has a liberal bias that the rightwingers had to create Fox News, and why they support Rush Limbaugh. They cannot win using the truth, and so they have to distort the facts in order to succeed.
It seems like all that has to be done to debunk conservatives is to analyze basic mental processes of logic.
Why is Brian Ross somehow a liberal (which in turn automatically makes ABC network liberal), only because he exposed the truth about what is going on with Mark Foley. Brian Ross had ONLY two choices before the story broke and after he had his sources solid:
1. Cover it up.
2. Report it.
#2 according to Evillib makes Ross and ABC a liberal network.
will *always* beat the unhinged rantings of the right. Great job, ellie717, for taking the unhinged righty out to the woodshed.
>>>"Tell that new policy to Brian Ross for exposing Mark Foley."<<<
Halperin's "we can't be perceived as being too liberal" policy, had it been in place to your liking at that time, would have kept the world in the dark about a sexual predator in Congress, kept it a nice, dark, damp secret that would have pleased right-wingers like you and your struggling, secretive, right-wing candidates.
...this 'blaze' guy is a one trick pony. He's a repeater... you're not going to get much more in depth analysis from this guy I'm afraid.
And, yes... apparently, limiting the exposure of minors to the sexual advances of pedophiles is 'liberal bias'.
this Blaze guy comes on here and says the same thing over again and again. I dont believe he has a grasp of the basic facts about this or any other subject.
Probably an RNC Plant. Maybe he is behind the racist Harold Ford ad? Probably too stupid to be behind it.
Don't want to be labeled a 'paranoiac' by Blaze -- Ha! Like a dose of paranoia, at this stage of the game, isn't deserved or warranted. Sort of a 'nothing to see here' approach ;-)
See a propaganda parrot has no capcity for higher brain function. Their brain works only in two modes record and regurgitate.
The MMFA headline states that Nightline "Could not point to a single Democratic example". Perhaps the more accurate phrase is "did not" because there are plenty of examples out there on factcheck.org and ads I have seen with my own eyes in Minnesota.
you know its not "mudslinging" when you agree with the mud being slung.
You almost got it right. Mudslinging isn't mudslinging when what is been slung isn't mud.
A place where they are pretty non-partisan but clearly lean towards the right at times, and I have not found this mountain of Democratic ads that you claim are there. There are a few ads that are misleading, but not lots that are negative and outright false. There are lots and lots of examples of those kinds of ads from the Republicans.
You can try to compare the two parties, like ABC and Nightline do, but the facts do not support your statements. That's why Media Matters said that both ABC and Nightline did not back up their allegations with factual evidence.
You are right. There are always examples to point to. It is disappointing that ABC chose not to back up its statement with an example or examples. It was bad journalism.
Good post
Most likely because what YOU consider negative ads would look so lukewarm and frankly ludicrous as an example of going negative next to the putrid GOP propaganda that they avoided doing so.
At least they didn't try to create negative ads where there were none, unlike All Things Considered, which was forced to call Michael J. Fox's ads negative to prop up their contention that "both sides do it."
Every time some scummy Republican ad comes out, the media says both sides do it, because they are still deathly afraid of being called liberal by the troglodytes. Even when, in many cases, there are no ads that rise to the level of Repubilcan bile put onto the airwaves.
THANK YOU. njguy93@yahoo.com
It's more nefarious than "everyone does it."
Studies have shown that NEGATIVE ADS WORK. The GOP is releasing them, full of lying ad hominem glory, and will be for the next two weeks.
THEY WANT THEM SHOWN OFTEN ON FREE TV SHOWS!!!!! It doesn't matter if they are "getting criticized" ... they can debunk that as partisan reaction. What matters is that the ads be SHOWN, and OFTEN, and WITHOUT CHARGE by the media who are ostensibly "discussing" them.
It's a great game, and it works if you understand that the GOP KNOW that their ads are untrue and smear-mongering, but wish them to be shown anyway because they WORK. Then you realize the "mainstream media", as always, is doing their bidding.
they learned so well from the swiftboat school of journalistic integrity.
Or if it isn't called that, it should be.
Before there was FOX... there was ABC.
I am watching these ads (non-political) about people talking about what there life was like before washing machines, cars, or whatever. Things like, "It was call a 45..."
And all I can think to say when I read this posting is, "I remember when the news was just that. The fact about what was important in the world rather than what corporations, political parties, or we have made important. Man I miss that."
...is simply a career-minded opportunist. Both majority parties have a less-than-pristine record when it comes to self-promotion. We can quibble over whether this ad or that ad qualifies as genuine 'mudslinging,' but the fact remains that both sides are quite willing to do so when it serves their interest; ascending to or remaining in power.
As for Factcheck, they list examples of both parties using misleading statements and/or outright falsehoods in their ads. Granted, I don't know that any of the Democratic ads qualify as "below the belt" or contain personal attacks, but the fact that ABC didn't air any Democratic ads for comparison is just poor journalism.