MSM Suffers Another Credibility Breakdown

You'll often read here and there about how the mainstream media has really failed in its search for the Truth over the past few years, with Judith "WMD" Miller of the NYT and the whole crew over at FOX News being exhibits A and B.


But just check out this intrepid reporting by MSNBC, which purports to quote Al Sharpton in a dubious defense of Michael Vick:

Most recently, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a two-time Democratic presidential candidate, charged that a star white athlete never would have been prosecuted for the same crime.


Like Hayes, Sharpton has denounced images of dogfighting in popular black culture, and he signed a letter with Russell Simmons condemning the activity as ignorant and cruel.


But at the same time, Sharpton argued that the prosecution of Vick was overkill.


"If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting unit out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of course not," Sharpton wrote Tuesday on his personal blog.


They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins.

Almost plausible, right? But as Digby sez, Al Sharpton is "colorful, but he isn't retarded." Sharpton's "dolphin-fighting" blog post is part of a parody site called newsgroper.com.


You'd think the giveaway would have been a "Featured Blogger" list that includes George W. Bush, Kim Jong-Il, Mr. T, Pope Benedict, Keith Richards and the Dalai Lama, among many others. None of that stopped MSNBC from reporting on the Sharpton quote as news, prompting certain grave-spinning by one Edward R. Murrow (who happens to blog at his own MySpace page, here).




And people wonder why the American public is uninformed.