What Credibility?

Eric Boehlert takes the uber-right's Fighting Keyboardists to the cleaners today in an absolute must-read post over at Media Matters.

It's time for warbloggers to find a new conspiracy theory to promote because their most recent one, which involved accusing the Associated Press of manufacturing a source in Iraq and colluding with the insurgents, blew up in their faces. But don't look for detailed corrections, let alone heartfelt apologies. Being a warblogger means not having to say you're sorry.

I've written extensively about this controversy because I think it perfectly captures the right-wing warbloggers and their never-ending goal to undermine the press. Not with thoughtful, factual analysis -- which is always welcome -- but by feverishly trying to undercut news reports that might pose a problem for President Bush's war in Iraq and by shifting attention onto the media. They want to simultaneously create confusion about facts, while undermining news consumers' confidence in the mainstream news media.

Indeed, warbloggers want to have it both ways. They want to bee seen as tenacious press critics, thoroughly scrutinizing the media's work and doing democracy a favor. But in reality they can't control their naked disdain for progressives, not to mention their consuming hatred of the "liberal media." It's a combination that routinely prompts them to launch dim-witted crusades built around flimsy, what-if conspiracy theories.

He goes on to give several examples of prominent uber-right bloggers, including Michelle malkin, who started out with the position that they had caught the AP faking a source and that, as Malikin put it, the verdict was "MSM credibility, RIP". Then, the news broke that AP's source really did exist and without a breath of apology they insist that insist proving whether Hussein was "a fake" was never all that important.

But now Iraq's own Ministry of Interior has confirmed Hussein's title, warbloggers are racing in reverse, insisting Hussein's existence was never the issue. (It "changes very little," SeeDubya assured his readers.) The disputed facts from the Nov. 24 dispatch, that's what warbloggers really wanted to nail down. Which, if you're following this loop, means that warbloggers just spent the last seven weeks and untold man-hours compiling a laundry list of vicious smears against the AP because warbloggers took issue with part of a single article the AP posted about Iraq. One article out of more than 10,000 articles the AP has posted about Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

There's far more, and it is one of the most consistently excellent debunkings of uber-right hyperbole I've ever read. Recommended.

Postscript Since the uber-right is so keen on smearing the messenger to discredit the message, and since what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and since I'm in a seriously snarky mood today, I will include the following. Earl, unaware I was going to post about this, emailled me with his Word of The Day from Wordsmith:

A.Word.A.Day--malkin
malkin (MO-kin, MAL-kin) noun
1. An untidy woman; a slattern.
2. A scarecrow or a grotesque effigy.
3. A mop made of a bundle or rags fastened to a stick.
4. A cat.
5. A hare.
[From Middle English Malkyn (little Molly), diminutive of the name Maud or Molly/Mary.]
A related word is grimalkin, referring to an old female cat or an ill-tempered old woman.

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

"And speaking o' cats, gray malkins hunt through the forest as well."
Cecilia Dart-Thornton; The Battle of Evernight;Aspect; 2003.