C-SPAN hosted a panel segment from the New Orleans Literacy Festival - News, Pundits and Politics which included NPR's Amy Dickinson, Fox's Ellis Henican, CNN's Mary Matalin, and Lousianna's Errol Laborde. Here's the description from C-SPAN's
April 24, 2011

C-SPAN hosted a panel segment from the New Orleans Literacy Festival - News, Pundits and Politics which included NPR's Amy Dickinson, Fox's Ellis Henican, CNN's Mary Matalin, and Lousianna's Errol Laborde.

Here's the description from C-SPAN's site:

A panel of journalists discussed the future of news and commentary. Among the issues they addressed were the presentation of news, selection of news stories for television broadcast, and political biases in the news. They also responded to questions from the audience.

Now any panel which includes the likes of Lady McCheney Mary Matalin and Fox's resident milquetoast excuse for a liberal Ellis Henican talking about bias in the media is laughable on its face, but what I didn't expect was that the panelist from NPR would turn out to be a huge, flaming wingnut. That didn't stop Mary Matalin from calling NPR a liberal network later on in the segment. Here's some of Dickinson's pearl clutching about being forced to watch MSNBC.

DICKINSON: A lot of us as consumers, we just go the thing that's going to feed us what we already believe. I really, really see this in my own little world where my mom, in the assisted living facility, they're all watching in her town, MSNBC nonstop, so I in many, many very long visits with her, I started watching MSNBC and I was like how can you watch this, and not want to shoot yourself?

Hey what do you know? Maybe I agree with her. Is she talking about Joe Scarborough and the Morning Joe crew? Chris Jansing? Andrea Mitchell?

DICKINSON: It was actually... I tend to watch Fox more often because I've been on Fox and um... MSNBC just blew my mind, it was so awful. I just couldn't, I was surprised honestly, because MSNBC has this, you know, NBC component that I considered to be, sort of one of the founding, you know, broadcast news sources in this country and I had no idea that MSNBC had become, so, so, so um... I don't know... left leaning I guess you'd call it. It's opinionated.

Nope. She's talking about their evening line up. She goes on to say that after she gets off the air on NPR, she listens to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh every day and praises them for being ahead of the curve with reporting stories that are not covered elsewhere in the media. Talk about listening to something that would make you want to shoot yourself. Good grief.

So much for NPR and their supposed liberal bias that seems to be the conventional wisdom from our politicians and talking heads in the press. Watching this panel segment on C-SPAN reminded me of watching Fox's weekend show Fox News Watch where they discuss the same topic, bias in the media with a bunch of biased talking heads. And Ellis Henican gets to play the faux liberal in both.

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