Topic: The Media
There's a reason why the term "journalistic standards" has become good for a laugh in conservative circles. Nowadays, if the target is on the right, the mainstream media's reporters and producers scarcely bother with such bothersome details as facts and evidence. Occasionally, to be sure, someone goes too far and gets the chop. When Dan Rather tried to topple President Bush with forged documents, he was put out to pasture. But on the whole, the media think they can get away with baseless attacks on the Bush Administration, Republicans and conservatives generally.
Take the case of Jill Simpson.
An Alabama lawyer of no great distinction or political background, she has become a heroine of progressivism. Here's how:
Simpson claims to have participated in a phone conversation with several Alabama Republicans in which she was made privy to a plot involving the Republican governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, a former justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a federal judge, two United States attorneys, several assistant United States attorneys, the Air Force, and, apparently 12 jurors, to "railroad" former governor Don Siegelman into his 2006 conviction for bribery and mail fraud.
As John H. Hinderaker notes in his story for the Weekly Standard from which the above extract is taken, Simpson's story is not only unsupported by a particle of evidence, but utterly ridiculous on its face. And Simpson herself? She's an obvious head case. Perhaps that's why progressives have so fervently embraced her: it takes one to know one. But why did CBS's legendary news show, 60 Minutes, give Simpson the time of day? Why her story was too good to pass up. It involved Karl Rove, the evil genius of neocon fascism. You need no facts or evidence to indict him.
