One reason the MSM don’t think they are biased
The Pelosi / Murtha / Hoyer affair is evidence of one reason that the MSM do not think that they are biased. The elite MSM news outlets have gone after Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi with a vengeance for her inept backing of Congressman Jack Murtha as her number two. Murtha lost resoundingly in a 149 - 86 secret ballot to Congressman Steny Hoyer. In the space of one week, Pelosi has gone from being heralded as the first woman Speaker of the House to having her behavior called “bizarre”, and her choices “farcical,” as well as being widely characterized as vengeful, petty, thin-skinned and “her own worst enemy.”
Howard Fineman of Newsweek: If Speaker-to-be Pelosi is going to succeed as Speaker of the House, she had better learn—fast—from the fiasco known as the Hoyer-Murtha Race. She violated every conceivable rule of Boss-like behavior: she lost, she lost publicly, she lost after issuing useless and unenforceable threats to people she barely had met, knowing (or having reason to know) that they would tell the world about her unsuccessful arm-twisting….One of the first rules of politics is that power is the appearance of power….Much is up to Pelosi. She has a reputation for never forgetting a slight or forgiving an enemy. But she has to realize that, this time at least, she was her own worst enemy.
New York Times: Nancy Pelosi has managed to severely scar her leadership even before taking up the gavel as the new speaker of the House. First, she played politics with the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee to settle an old score and a new debt. And then she put herself in a lose-lose position by trying to force a badly tarnished ally, Representative John Murtha…Mr. Murtha would have been a farcical presence in a leadership promising the cleanest Congress in history. Ms. Pelosi should have been first to realize this, having made such a fiery campaign sword of her vows to end Capitol corruption. Instead, she acted like some old-time precinct boss and lost the first test before her peers.
LA Times: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is off to a rocky start. On the same day she was formally elected to lead the new Democratic majority, party colleagues refused to endorse her bizarre choice of Rep. John P. Murtha…The most substantial — and alarming — speculation regarding the Harman-Pelosi rift is that the speaker may consider Harman too moderate…Harman…may be insufficiently partisan in Pelosi’s eyes. Pelosi, who has vowed to lead the House from the center, should think twice before indulging in a witch hunt of colleagues…
There is certainly no doubt that the MSM can savage the members of their own team, and no doubt that makes them feel that they are unbiased because they can be as mean to Democrats as they are to Republicans.
Possibly you are thinking: yes, but consider the timing. This criticism of Pelosi is post-election. We didn’t see such criticism of her flawed decision-making and political instincts in the run-up to November 7. The MSM are of course going to be furiously critical of Pelosi or anyone who jeopardize the Democrats’ (and MSM’s) power, now that they have it back. A fair point perhaps.
As for us, we were waiting for some MSM comment on what was surely the most humorous moment of the Pelosi / Hoyer / Murtha dust-up. The most amusing part of the post-Hoyer news conference was Jack Murtha’s praising Nancy Pelosi for her work in Congress leading the “flight” on Iraq, not the fight. Surely this apt Freudian slip deserved notice somewhere, as perhaps did Ms. Pelosi’s response, “We’ve got to get out.” Alas, the MSM were nowhere to be seen on these two telling moments.