Wednesday, December 29, 2004
The Award he'd Rather not get...
...or maybe he’s honored. *You* ask him.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Sandy “don’t look in my pants” Berger
Terry McAuliffe
- Joseph Goebbels
Thomas Sowell: Events of this past year have shown the need for a special award in journalism for those who think that the purpose of reporting news is to cause the public to adopt the political views of those who do the reporting. Therefore this column announces the first annual Joseph Goebbels award for that journalist who best exemplifies the spirit and the practice that Dr. Goebbels pioneered.
...Had there been such an award in 2003, “Baghdad Bob” would have been the clear winner ... Holding the same official position as Dr. Goebbels, Baghdad Bob would have been the perfect first winner of this award. But such are the lost opportunities of history.
And who would be the winner?
Maybe Ted Koppel who went half-way ‘round the world to interview Vietnamese ‘peasants’ about an incident in the middle of a war 30 years ago? ...with the implicit assumption that these village folk would have known at the time that it was John Kerry charging into their homes, M16 at the ready?!? ...while the interviewees were being monitored by Communist party keepers?!?!? ...and failed to interview one [1] American witness to the same incident who could reasonable be assumed to know the identity of their fellow soldier?!??
Certainly qualified, but for Sowell, Ted is just Miss Congeniality in this contest. Nope, Sowell’s favorite is…
*drumroll*
This year’s Joseph Goebbels award goes by a narrow but decisive margin to CBS News anchorman Dan Rather for his planned broadcast on “60 Minutes”—just days before the election—to discredit President Bush’s National Guard service 30 years earlier. Leave aside for the moment the fact that discrepancies in the documents he relied on have convinced experts and many others that they were forgeries. Why was what George W. Bush did or didn’t do 30 years earlier “news” in 2004?
It was news by Dr. Goebbels’ standard—something that could lead to desired political reactions by the audience. Waiting until it would have been virtually impossible for an effective answer to be made before election day was in the same Goebbels spirit. Had the documents been real, Dan Rather would still have been a strong contender for the award. The fact that virtually everyone, with the notable exception of Mr. Rather, now regards those documents as fake—instead of simply “not authenticated”—makes Dan Rather the clear winner of the Joseph Goebbels award for 2004.
...It is the purpose that is decisive, so that even honest people are eligible for this award. We have to be inclusive.
*standing ovation*
*great throwing of pies*
ThanQ! AQ1!
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