Mr. Rather, Your (Pink) Slip is Showing

Professor Jay Rosen of NYU has amalgamated a cornucopia of news clippings supporting the notion that John Kerry is only the 2nd biggest loser in the election. The first? A few smatterings:

Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes writes, “For some 16 months, then, journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the television networks saw themselves not as conveyors of facts but as truth-squadders, toiling away on the gray margins of political debate to elucidate the many misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies of the Bush administration and its campaign affiliates.”

“We've watched in slack-jawed amazement over recent weeks as the big media, fearful of another four years for President Bush, have basically become an unpaid adjunct to the Kerry campaign”, states an Investor’s Daily editorial.

According to Peggy Noonan, “Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief--CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election--the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down.”

“Some networks resisted declaring that Bush had won Ohio after pleas from Kerry operatives not to project a winner of the state. In the White House pressroom, dispirited correspondents sheepishly avoided members of the Bush team who wandered through the West Wing expressing growing irritation at the networks’ refusal to admit the inevitable. As each hour passed, the credibility of the Old Media “swirled around the bowl”, perhaps for the last time before finally being flushed by the American viewing public,” euphemizes Jeff Gannon, pajama wearing blogger.