Media Matters

2008 Election

Brokaw misquoted and misrepresented Bill Clinton remark he described as "pretty provocative"
Misquoting and misrepresenting what he described as a "pretty provocative" remark by former President Bill Clinton, Tom Brokaw claimed that Clinton said, "[Y]ou've got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X, you agree with everything that he stands for, but you have some real doubts about his experience. Candidate Y only believes in half the things but you really trust his experience -- who you gonna vote for?" But Clinton did not raise the issue of "experience" in his remarks, and Brokaw did not mention -- as he did when discussing Clinton's remarks earlier on MSNBC Live -- that Clinton said the hypothetical he described "has nothing to do with what's going on now." Read more

More MSNBC coverage

Fox News aired two minutes of Democratic keynote address, discussed Ayers instead
On August 26, Fox News aired just over two minutes of former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner's keynote address to the convention. After returning from a commercial, Alan Colmes stated, "In other election news, an independent group supporting John McCain released an ad last week attacking [Sen.] Barack Obama's ties to former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers," and aired an ad from the Obama campaign responding to the independent ad. Colmes and Sean Hannity then interviewed Rudy Giuliani. Read more

O'Donnell asked why not let McCaskill give a "red meat" speech at the DNC -- McCaskill did, but MSNBC didn't cover

Media bury, ignore Leach speech at Democratic National Convention

Boehlert

Hillary Clinton speaks at convention. The press concocts a story
By Eric Boehlert
Many in the press have portrayed Clinton's planned convention address, as well as the fact that her name is being placed into nomination, as an unprecedented, heavy-handed power grab. It's not. In years past, Democratic candidates who won lots of primaries and accumulated hundreds of delegates (sorry, Howard Dean and Bill Bradley) have always been allowed to address the convention and very often place their name into nomination. It's the norm. It's expected. It's a formality. This newly manufactured media attack on Clinton is just the latest in a long line of press grenades thrown her way this year. But this time, she's not the only victim, because the media's concocted story line is being used to unfairly skewer Barack Obama, too. Read more

AP's Fournier counts the "I's" in Clinton's speech, but her focus was often outward
In an AP "analysis," Ron Fournier asserted that Sen. Hillary Clinton's convention speech, which he described as "laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun 'I,' " was part of the "bill" Sen. Barack Obama had to pay for Clinton's agreement to "end[] her historic bid for the presidency in a manner that, however messy, still left Obama in a stronger position than Kennedy left Jimmy Carter in 1980, when the Massachusetts senator extracted platform concessions and shrank from the traditional unity show at the final gavel." In fact, Media Matters counted 21 instances in the speech in which Clinton used "I." But in at least 13 of these instances, Clinton was not focusing on herself and was instead making one of three points: her support for Obama's election; the importance of the 2008 election; and who really matters in this election. Read more

Did we mention the AP has a Ron Fournier problem?
-- Eric Boehlert, blogging at County Fair