By Brad Friedman on 1/27/2009, 1:50pm PT  

And speaking of Rightwing rubes and hacks enjoying big salaries from seemingly-respectable mainstream corporate media outlets, Bernie Goldberg has released his silly new book, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, but the well-documented coverage of the book's arguments, so far, suggests it's a lollapalooza of inaccuracy, fudged facts, and mangled and out-and-out doctored "evidence". Color us stunned.

Media Matters has begun to fact-check the book, and has, for example, meticulously examined what Goldberg describes as "snippets" from an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, conducted by PBS' Charlie Rose, that purportedly reveals how Brokaw, and his Obama-loving big media brethren were in the tank for Obama from the git.

The only trouble? Goldberg has out-and-out doctored the transcript of the actual interview to make his case by completely re-arranging comments (often putting them entirely out of order), changing actual words to give them entirely different meanings than obviously intended when viewing the actual transcript, and leaving out huge chunks of the discussion which completely counter the argument being made by Goldberg --- who laughably considers himself both a journalist and a media crictic --- to try to sandbag the targets of his hit piece.

For example, at the end of one of the books many snarky grafs in which Goldberg argues that Brokaw waited until "just before Election Day to decide that he had no idea who Obama was," Goldberg sniffs "Ain't journalism wonderful?"

He then offers some of the "snippets" from that interview to help make his case, like this one:

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There's a lot about him we don't know.

Brokaw's busted, right?! Not so fast. Because now it gets high-larious. Or, at least it would be high-larious, were it not for the seemingly endless wingnut welfare available to the rube Goldberg and his ilk, from multi-million dollar propaganda houses like the rightwing whacko Regnery Publishing, who describe themselves, accidentally(?) ironically, as "a hit machine".

So, here's how MM dissects what was actually said, as documented by the actual, unedited transcript of the Brokaw/Rose interview, as compared to Goldberg's wholly mangled, out-of-context, out-of-order, "quoted" snippet above...

But that's not how Brokaw answered Rose's question. As Media Matters documented in response to Limbaugh's previous distortions of the same interview, Brokaw was not purporting to express his own view when he said, "There is a lot about him we don't know"; he attributed the view to "conservative commentators." Moreover, the statement was not in response to the question about "heroes"; rather, it was made earlier in the conservation. Brokaw responded to the "heroes" question by saying that "Thurgood Marshall is a big hero of" Obama's --- a statement that is missing from Goldberg's portrayal of the interview.

Here's the actual Charlie Rose transcript, with the text that Goldberg included in bold:

ROSE: Exactly, two of them, two books. What do you make of him? Tell me what you see there, because I was talking to a friend of mine, and he said, I see someone who is clearly aspirational, someone who is clearly bright, someone who is clearly ambitious in the best sense of that, but who is clearly cautious. And in the end, he may very well be a man of the center.

BROKAW: He is a very interesting figure in American politics. He has made very few false steps along the way, when you think about this long, difficult road that he has been on --- against the Clinton machine first, and the appearances he has made all over the country.

Sure, he has hit some speed bumps, and there are conservative commentators who say there is a lot about him we don't know because we haven't asked enough tough questions --- the Bill Ayers relationship --- even those who say we've got to go back and explore what his drug use was.

[...]

ROSE: All right. We know people sometimes by the books that they read, heroes they have. We know John McCain, for example, enormously admires Teddy Roosevelt, probably more than anyone else
in a political sense, and really wanted to run a campaign, you know, in which Teddy would be his model --- Teddy Roosevelt.

What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama --

BROKAW: He likes Justice --

ROSE: --- the books?

BROKAW: Well, he --- Thurgood Marshall is a big hero of his. He has got a picture of him in his office.

ROSE: Now was that because of his central role in arguing Brown versus Board of Education?

BROKAW: Well, I think that --- remember Barack Obama went to Harvard Law School and taught at the University of Chicago, and there was no greater legal figure in the African-American community or in those times when America was changing than Thurgood Marshall. So, that makes perfect sense.

As you can see, Goldberg's "snippet" was not even close to what was actually said in the interview.

Ain't journalism wonderful?

For the full extent of Goldberg's astounding hackery --- and often, even more grotesque reporting hatchet job on the Brokaw/Rose interview --- see MM's full article. For shorter, but no less embarrassing, coverage of other points in the book which collapse immediately upon inspection, see here and here.

To see and hear Goldberg for yourself, tune into the O'Reilly Factor on Fox "News" almost any night of the week, or Sean Hannity on ABC Radio (where both of the government welfare queens, Goldberg and Hannity, enjoy the government largess of our public airwaves on a daily basis to promote their phony horseshit to you and millions of others). Remember: Liars and clowns like O'Reilly, Hannity, Goldberg et al come into your cars and homes nearly every day thanks to your public tax dollars. Enjoy! Or fix the problem.

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