Media Matters: Conservatives' Perpetual Dishonesty Machine

by Ben Dimiero

Media Matters For America

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh regularly tout their supposed accuracy and often claim their critics never prove them wrong. Fittingly, this in itself is a complete falsehood. Limbaugh and Beck are wrong for a living, but have been rewarded for their perpetual wrongness by assuming the role of the two most important cogs in the conservative media.

Every day, the conservative noise machine -- Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, and other prominent conservative talk radio hosts and bloggers -- hurl false accusations with the hopes of damaging the Obama administration, Democrats, and progressives politically. Make no mistake: this is the primary motivation for the majority of the stories they promote. Pesky things like "facts" and "reality" are, at best, a trivial concern.

Often, these attacks are baseless, easily debunked, and laughably absurd -- yet conservative media outlets rarely (if ever) offer corrections when they are proven wrong. Instead they either double down on their attacks or simply ignore that they were wrong in the first place and move on to the next overhyped bit of nonsense.

While it may seem like a minor story in the grand scheme of things, one example from this week perfectly exemplifies the utter lack of journalistic standards endemic to conservative media.

More: http://mediamatters.org/columns/201007300026

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Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. ~ Henri-Frederic Amiel

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world. ~ Margaret Mead

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. ~ Maya Angelou

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. ~ William Sloane Coffin