Saturday, May 30, 2009

With Friends Like These - More Fair and Balanced from NPR

A reader of this blog earlier noted his letter to the OMBOTsman regarding NPR's habit of always having supposedly liberal Daniel Schorr balanced out on every show by a more rightwing voice (can you say Foxista Juan Williams?).

This morning featured Juan Williams (and Scott Simon) parroting the right wing talking points on the Sotomayor nomination:
(Williams) "But on the face of it Scott, you'd have to say that her language - and if you took it for what it was worth - was racist."
That was the view from the right, but what about the liberal views on the weeks news? Consider these statements from Schorr talking with Simon later in the program:
  • "We have not witnessed a nuclear explosion in anger since 1945..."
  • "Nuclear weapons going steadily into more and more hands and not very responsible hands..."
  • "Probably the most immediate dangerous is what's called proliferation. Israel has already had to bomb an installation in Syria which apparently had North Korean help in getting a nuclear weapon."
  • "And so for the civilized world right now the immediate thing is to prevent further proliferation which may mean having to board and search ships at sea."
Holy smokes! However - civilized, responsible Schorr wasn't done yet. With a prompt from Simon, he's off an running on Iran:
(Simon): "Does the policy of extending a hand in friendship look a little naive this week?"
(Schorr): "I don't know if it looks, if it is naive, but it looks as though it's not getting very far..."
I'm not sure what hand of friendship Simon and Schorr are fantasizing about. Maybe they mean one of the AIPAC enriched palms of Dennis Ross - chief of Obama's non-diplomacy policy toward Iran.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"But on the face of it Scott, you'd have to say that her language - and if you took it for what it was worth - was racist."

People like Williams just hate it when people like Sotomayor (and Reverend Wright) tell the unvarnished truth.

That they are quick to characterize it as "racist" says far more about their own biases than it does about those of the people they are attempting to discredit.

It's actually very similar to the response of many people to criticisms of Israel. many are quick to characterize any and all such criticisms as anti-Semitic not because they actually are but because that is a very effective way of silencing people.