from Truthdig:
Murdoch’s Minions Smear Bloggers Posted on Jul 25, 2007
By Joe Conason
Not so long ago, the Republican right expected to dominate American politics for generations to come. Karl Rove, “boy genius” of the GOP, believed that his generation had achieved a partisan realignment that would overturn the progressive achievements of the past century.
Now those confident predictions have crashed with the failure of George W. Bush and the rise of a new progressive politics powered by the Internet. What traditional pundits once dismissed as the unwashed peasantry of the blogosphere has risen up to donate millions of dollars, elect Democratic candidates and demand real change. Having inflicted a terrible defeat on the Republicans last year, the “netroots” progressives are preparing to achieve historic victories in 2008.
Naturally, the would-be bullies of the right have not taken this development very well. As reactionaries tend to do, they have reacted with anger and attempted intimidation.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has mounted a crusade against DailyKos.com, the largest progressive political website, and YearlyKos, the site’s annual blogger convention, which will take place in Chicago next month. On his nightly broadcast, Fox News sage Bill O’Reilly charged that the proprietors of Daily Kos are “hatemongers” like the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis—and targeted JetBlue for serving as the official airline of YearlyKos. O’Reilly’s ranting and raving frightened the JetBlue suits into withdrawing their sponsorship.
Then came Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, another Murdoch minion, who tried to frighten the Democrats away from Daily Kos. “Every Democratic presidential nominee is going to the Daily Kos convention,” he sniffed. “That’s the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. ... Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left-wing blogs.” Clearly he meant to warn that the Democrats would suffer from their association with those disreputable leftists—and that the netroots are a fringe, extremist element.
The most obvious answer is to urge them both to look in the mirror. To listen to O’Reilly—who has publicly urged the destruction of San Francisco and Iran, in addition to making thousands of other equally charming remarks—is to hear corrosive hatred distilled into a nightly dose of poison. The occasional outburst on a liberal blog, almost always in the anonymous comments section, cannot compare with the daily outpouring of vitriol on Fox. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070725_murdochs_minions_smear_bloggers/
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