Sufferin' succotash

In characterizing as "absurd" Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism's spectacularly self-evident study of Fox News' and MSNBC's respective right/left bias in their presidential election coverage, Phil Griffin has achieved ultimate oneness with laughable indefensibility: 

"Everybody tries to make an equivalency between the two of us and it’s not true," said Griffin, MSNBC's president. "[I]n prime time and in tone, they have an agenda."

Now that's absurd. Does Griffin not watch his own network? Assuming he does, then either I'm hallucinating or he is. If that's not a prime-time agenda--some of it executed with sophistication; the other, more Punch Schultz and Judy Maddow--then I'm Ann Coulter.

Yet there's nothing wrong with having an agenda. Buddha had an agenda, Tolstoy had an agenda, Socrates had an agenda, and word is that Christ had an agenda, even if a bit more comprehensibly sublime than the recondite transcendence of Black Friday. Indeed we all have an agenda, and the Truth, Mr. Griffin, shall free your sets. There's nothing wrong with an O'Donnell panel or Matthews panel occasionally mentioning that if all this--whatever "this" happens to be that evening--sounds like a determined "agenda," the only hate mail said panel will ponder is that which is accompanied by cited disproof of its factual basis.

Embrace not the indefensible, Mr. Griffin, but your agenda-ness. Otherwise, saying they--the paranoid and propagandistic buffoons at Fox News--have one and you don't, when you so obviously do, just sounds silly.

Comments

[AnneJ]

Does the man not watch his own network? Especially the prime time on air talent? And I say this as a regular viewer who agrees with their agenda. I've tried watching Fox, not for a different point of view, but to remind myself not to live in an echo chamber of all liberal talk all the time as if it's a universal truth. But I just can't stomach it for more than two minutes and the only way I can watch is viewed through the lens of parody on such programs as "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" especially Colbert, because he plays the part of a conservative pundit and is hilarious. But I figure the community where I live is right wing enough so I hear enough of their views just through encounters in everyday life away from the tv. And I'm ok with that as it is.