High School Equivilency Test

The Wingers love to play a little game, and that game is "Yeah but Liberals are equally as bad if not worse." Doesn't matter what horrible things Wingers do, in their own minds they can instantly find something a Dirty F'ckin Hippie did and it justifies everything they've done or will do.

Case in point: the Winger's latest screed that "Okay, FOX News is a propaganda outfit, but MSNBC is equally as bad if not worse than FOX!"

Greg Sargent tackles that straw man.

This meme got a boost last night when CNN’s Cambell Brown grilled White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett on the Fox affair. After Jarrett said that “of course” Fox is biased, Brown pushed back: “Do you also think that MSNBC is biased?” Jarrett demurred. Ben Smith dubs this the White House’s “MSNBC problem.”

Sure, MSNBC has Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Schultz. But it’s debatable, to begin with, that they are polar opposites — in terms of their ideology or their relationship to reality — of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

Put that aside, however. More to the point, it’s plainly obvious that there’s a much brighter line between reporting and commentary at MSNBC than there is at Fox.

Consider MSNBC’s daytime content. Morning Joe is hardly a liberal program. Throughout the day you get lots of reporting and commentary from Chuck Todd and David Shuster. Todd fits squarely in the “nonpartisan Beltway analyst” category. Shuster? Sure, he’s aggressive in debunking conservative attack lines, but agree with him or not, Shuster calls them as he sees them on the facts, and he’s fundamentally a reporter.

More to the point is MSNBC’s news judgment throughout the day, which contrasts sharply with that of Fox. You’d be hard pressed to argue that MSNBC’s choice of stories to report on is as ideologically driven as Fox’s editorial choices. There’s simply no equivalent on the MSNBC news side of Fox’s constant “news” coverage of the tea partiers, the czars, the ACORN story, the crusade against gay education adviser Kevin Jennings, etc. etc. The point is that Fox’s new judgment is far more ideologically motivated than MSNBC’s is.

Bonus points for noticing the Villager pushing the meme is Politico's Ben Smith. He's auditioning for a role in the Village pretty hard this year (along with NBC political director Chuck Todd and ABC's Jake Tapper) and he's trying pretty hard to get into the high school lunchroom cool clique.

Remember the number of Villagers who made their bones trashing the Clintons? (Wingers will say "Yeah but look at Maddow and Olbermann, they made their bones off of trashing Bush every night!" Because reality has a well-known liberal bias, you see. The rise of Glenn Beck, Brit Hume, Bill-O and friends during Bush's administration is just proof of how America hates liberals. ) All this goes back to that: These guys are trying to become the new Villagers in the age of Teh Internets.