Bill O'Reilly had Amanda Carpenter on The O'Reilly Factor yesterday (she's now with the Washington Times) to do one his segments called "Policing the Net," which is supposed to highlight the wackiness on the left and right side of the blogosphere. It's an attempt to minimize us, as usual.
The segment dealt with blogger reactions over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. O'Reilly singled out Michelle Malkin's Hot Air as a blog that had nutty posts on it regarding the Supreme Court nomination.
What O'Reilly did is typical of what some mainstream media types do to us -- and also is what Michelle Malkin, this proprietor of Hot Air, has a history of doing: He cherry-picked some crazy comments and assigned them to the bloggers as if they wrote it as one of their pieces.
Hot Air rightly has a legitimate gripe, because they didn't write the crazy comments that O'Reilly uses to attack them with, but it was from one of their pre-screened commenters instead:
O'Reilly: Alright, I'm going to read a couple of comments, these are from bloggers. Free Republic is probably the roughest right wing website....
This comes from Hot Air.com, "Unqualified, militant and socialist. NEXT please. The GOP has to block any of Hussein's (That's the president) extremist picks".
You know when you read something like that nobody's going to block the pick. Do you ever think who's writing this? Does that person live in the US, it's just not going to happen. The numbers are overwhelmingly democratic and they're going to vote for her.
And the guy who writes this, I guess isn't living here. Let's got to the liberal side.
Amanda Carpenter, once a loyal rightie, didn't even bother to offer up a defense for them (or for Kos). I guess getting a gig with the Moonies has affected her judgment.
I want to ask Allahpundit a question: How does it feel? Your boss has set this very standard up on her own blog by going into liberal blogger comment sections (she does that to C&L quite often) and then cherry-picking our comments to prove her own silly talking points of the moment. It doesn't feel good, does it?
Yeah, you defended Kos one time, but since Malkin set the standard a long time ago, your defense is hollow. Go read her book "Unhinged," and see where it goes.
In response, I know I've highlighted their commenters repeatedly to try and show the MSM what goes on there too. Of course, it's very difficult to post on most right-wing blogs. On the left, we've always kept it pretty open, but once wingers came here and left lynching pictures on my site back in 2005, so I had to change my policies.
The MSM, which was afraid of the right-wingers, used our comments sections to try and paint liberal bloggers as crazy, anti-American traitors who are mean-spirited and vile people. The media always wanted to never give a face to the liberal blogs, but depicted us as this formless, nasty comment entity blob that oozes around the Internet so that it would scare away readers from our work. That didn't work out very well, because readers understood it was a bogus claim. You see, they read what we write and how we present it to our readers. And now the liberal blogosphere is an industry standard that the traditional media are imitating in their quest to catch up with us.
I do agree with Hot Air that O'Reilly smeared them, but I have no sympathy for them, because Michelle Malkin is the queen of using this tactic. Malkin then went on Fox and complained, and righties are asking for a retraction from BillO. Good luck with that, and too bad. You set this up, and now you get to taste what you cooked.
Everyone knows that comments on blogs do not equal what I or any other blogger means when they post. I never even curse in my posts (who would have guessed, since I'm a dirty f*&king hippie). And if Malkin wants an apology she should start by apologizing to all of us first.
