Finally someone has given us an example to follow on how to deal with a spinner.
Chris Matthres of the MSNBC program Hardball nails Michelle Malkin to the wall for trying to spin John Kerry as having shot himself to earn a purple heart.
DV Guide : HOWTO Deal with a Spinner: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
[Update] Here you can see the video without having to install Bit Torrent (if it wasn’t already)
ah man, i wanted to watch that, but its a bittorrent file…?
Except Matthews lured Malkin on to talk about *her* book, switched topics, and later kicked her off before her book came back up. His bait’n’switch drew him overall negatives in commentary, as you can confirm with a Google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=malkin+matthews
Her account of the experience:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000418.htm
Great stuff. Even better to read her side of the story. I love seeing a journalist admit to the blogsphere’s influence… yum yum!
John, while I didn’t see the whole segment, and still don’t know the full story of what happend. Do you? I mean, all we have is her word for what happend, not Matthews or the producers at MSNBC. I have to admit I have a hard time thinking that Michelle is unbiased in this story, not at least because she works for the GOP Channel, sorry – I mean Fox.
Flashape, you can watch the video and read some of what John obviously thinks is “negatives in commentary” (Its from his search) here:
http://www.oliverwillis.com/node/view/329
Just a quick comment: Regardless of what Michelle is saying now. Listen to what she is actually saying in the program. On the show she is actually claiming that some veterans have accused John Kerry of shooting himself/getting self inflicted wounds. Matthews repeatedly asked her if thats actually what she meant, and she never refuted it, she never actually claims it was shrapnel. She is a good spinner, no doubt. But this time she was shot down.
Jarle, no, I didn’t invest a lot of time in the Matthews/Malkin thing myself… just happened across it while reading other stuff, and I knew how to find the links again.
I remember that one issue was Matthews saying “oh, you’re saying ‘he shot himself’?” when hearing Malkin’s original “self-inflicted”, which was corroborated by what the other officer in that boat reports about the incident (news search of “admiral kerry self-inflicted” pulls it up). Matthews tried to turn “self-inflicted” into a deliberate self-induced wound… wacky rhetoric. That’s part of why he lost so much street cred after his show.
John, I think we have a difference of perception here. What I saw in the interview is Matthews responding to Malkin’s claim of “self inflicted wounds” with a question to Malkin asking her if she is claiming Kerry shot himself, something she doesn’t refute, instead she actually claims some veterans claimed just that in the book. (Which they don’t, as far as I can tell).
It might be that Matthews was confused, but it also appears to me as if Malkin wasn’t trying to correct him – but rather went with it. That she then got shot down so hard is what seems to irk her the most.
Thats what I saw, anyways.