Media Matters (and Don Imus)

Economics Political Theory
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alright a quick run down of the question before the question…

There is a group (I believe its funded by george sorose and Hillary Clinton claims she heled to start it) that does nothing but sit around with a tape recorder playing and scan the airways listening and watching and waiting for someone to say something offensive. and when someone does, these people pounce! like a… hippo. and link the offensive sound bite on their site. they actually play it over and over again at http://www.mediamatters.org/ and then make copies and mail it out to all the major network news companies. In the effort to “hold people accountable” or “censor” them via public outrage. this is the fate that befell Don Imus. he made his comment about the Rutgers girls, and no one cared because no one listens to his show except as backround noise I’m sure. but then 2 or 3 days later media matters really got in it, and by the end of the week he was suspended and then later fired.

now Im not sure what to think… on one hand its private indivuduals excersizing free speech no gov’t involved whatsoever, and this seems to be kind of the sort of thing the anarcho capitalists would want…

on the other hand it isn’t because it isn’t the market in a pure sense. if listeners of his show had called in with outrage, or if the sponsors had dropped their ad slots after hearing HIS show it would be different. but the fact is the only people that really got pissed off from listening was the media matters crowd and latter all the people that heard the sound bite because of them…

So whats up? what is a minarchist or anarcho capitalist or just regular old classical liberal going to say on something like this!? I’m fairly confident I could have an hour long debate with myself over this and not come to a conclusion… so how bout a little help here?

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Did you get that conspiracy theory from Bill O’Reilly? Because it isn’t true. O’Reilly’s claim is that George Soros funds Media Matters because a group that he funds also contributes to it. This is pretty stupid. If George Soros wanted to fund them, he’d fund them. O’Reilly’s claim is a guilt-by-association. It’s like a lot of the claims made about Jack Abramoff, when they say, “Such and such politician accepted money from a group that was associated with Abramoff!!”

It’s a pretty clean cut guilt-by-association.

I haven’t heard Hillary Clinton had anything to do with it. I suspect it’s based upon similarly spurious reasoning.

As for the rest of your questions – political correctness is a disease. Today, the ADL, the Christian Right, CAIR, the NAACP, GLAAD, and many, many other groups attempt to coerce others into expressing views they disagree with. It isn’t even just about racism or bigotry. They go after plenty of innocent people, too.

Just because it’s not a crime worth enforcing through the law doesn’t make it any less despicable.

Also, there are Conservative groups that do this same stuff.

Here’s a group devoted to finding supposed “evidence” of the liberal media:

They do the same kind of work that media matters does.

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hey. the only time I watch O’reily is when I am walking through the living room and someone else is watching it! the guy is a hack. I have no idea how he got a show on there. but I do remember seeing an actual clip of Clinton saying she helped to start it… but maybe my memory is bad, I’ll look into it later…

so far as the rest of your post goes… I think I agree…