Here's Eric Alterman, who writes about the liberal media a lot:
Where have you gone, Joe McCarthy? A nation turns its lazy MSM to you ...
See the attempt by ABC's The Note, authored by Rick Klein, to implicate Barack Obama in the Blagojevich crimes without a shred of evidence, here. Key McCarthyite weasel words: "It isn't about the direct implications ... might be enough to keep a scandal around for a while ... the heretofore flawless transition ... underbelly of the Obama political operation, with all its Chicago tints and taints, is now fair game ... culture of corruption has put its home on the market ... a genuine what-did-the-president-elect-know-and-when-did-he-know-it." Well, you get the point. (Were the McCarthyism not so blatant, we could do an over-the-top cliché count, but that will have to wait for another day.) Note that way down below, more than 20 paragraphs into his repeated and unsupported insinuations, Klein admits, "There's no suggestions of Obama culpability," and yet he has done little but suggest as much.
We also learn below that not only did the governor constantly complain about Obama's refusal to play ball with him, but also, via Lynn Sweet in the Chicago Sun-Times, "Blagojevich was under a cloud during Obama's entire presidential campaign, and the Obama team kept him at a distance. The Illinois governor never stumped for Obama -- they did not want him -- and unlike other Democratic governors, he did not play any significant role in the campaign." What's more, "In a sequence of events that neatly captures the contradictions of Barack Obama's rise through Illinois politics, a phone call he made three months ago to urge passage of a state ethics bill indirectly contributed to the downfall of a fellow Democrat he twice supported, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich," Mike McIntire and Jeff Zeleny write in The New York Times.
(In fact, my Chicago political sources inform me that Blago actually quietly supported Blair Hull in the Democratic Senate primary in 2004 won by Obama, and Blago received Hull's support for his campaign in 2002. Further, Hull's ex-wife worked in Blago's administration, heading up the Illinois Film Office.)
Now, Rick Klein is a bit player in the MSM, but because of The Note's meta-role in both setting and reflecting conventional wisdom -- originally pioneered by that tireless promoter of all things Rovian, Mark Halperin -- it is worth studying to understand what are the potentially defining narratives that the rest of the MSM are about to embrace. If you read today's Note, you can see how desperate are its members to start trying to take Obama down more than a few pegs, regardless of how trivial -- or, in this case, nonexistent -- the grounds may be. Given that Obama worked in the state senate and got elected to the U.S. Senate in the same state, he could hardly have had less to do with the guy. And yet like the entire nonexistent issue with his alleged BFF Bill Ayers, reporters will beat this already-dead horse till the proverbial cows come home.
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/?f=h_column
