Soft-selling Bloviation

Moving to the Right

A light and fluffy peice here on Brit Hume (by Howie Kurtz ... go figure), rightwing apologist extraordinaire. A couple of excerpts to note that really make one wonder how on earth the "liberal media" excuses crap for reporting:

Hume is no partisan brawler in the mold of some of Fox's high-decibel hosts. By virtue of his investigative background, his understated style and his management role, he represents a hybrid strain: conservatives who believe in news, not bloviation, but news that passes through a different lens, filtered through a different set of assumptions.

... and elsehwere:

When he was assigned to cover Walter Mondale's campaign to unseat Reagan in 1984, Hume says that "personally, I didn't want Mondale to win the election. But I admired him and liked him and felt it was my job to give him a fair shake." Hume was "a real favorite of Mondale's," says Joe Lockhart, who worked on that campaign. In 1988, however, Michael Dukakis's campaign complained to ABC that Hume's coverage of Vice President Bush was much softer than the network's reporting on the Democratic nominee.

After moving up to the White House beat in 1989, Hume occasionally got into arguments with anchor Peter Jennings over how stories should be handled.

"He and Peter had some clashes over coverage of the White House," says Charlie Gibson, who worked closely with Hume before becoming a co-host of "Good Morning America." "I saw Brit make arguments to Peter when he felt Peter was taking a position that was left of center, or wrong."

Hume says he came to feel "out of step with ABC News's natural tendencies." He recalls challenging an assignment about how the first President Bush "isn't doing anything" by saying: "Has it ever occurred to you that this guy's a Republican and Republicans don't believe that government is the solution to all the country's problems?"

&

Hume and Fox News were among the first to jump on the charges by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam record, with Hume pushing the controversy day after day.

As the lead panelist on "Fox News Sunday," Hume said in August 2004 that the book by the Swift Boat Veterans "is a remarkably well-done document. It is full of detail. It is full of specifics. The charges that are being made of Kerry, of irresponsible and indeed in some cases mendacious conduct in his service in Vietnam, are made by people who were there."

If the same arguments Hume offers were made by, oh lets use Brian Williams as an example, the right would be howling "bias" from the rooftops. But here we have the reporter assigned to cover two Presidential candidates that he essentially admits to wanting them defeated, offers the most libertine excuse for a President that even many conservatives don't bother defending, and follows it all up by running John O'Neil's spin on a book riddled with proven lies in the name of trying to strip medals off a man's chest.

No, no partisan brawler there. Just an "understated hybrid strain that represents a belief in news, not bloviation."

Puhleeze!