The press finally gets Romney's mendacity?

TPM reports a veritable journalistic uprising in the form of "news articles, tweets, and other media" as members of the Fourth Estate, "usually reluctant to criticize campaigns directly, have taken Romney to task for running a misleading TV ad creating the false impression that Jeep will ship jobs to China."

This--to jump on merely one of Romney's fabrication--strikes me as distressingly peculiar. Why single out Romney's Jeep ad? Can you think of any ad, on any subject, from job creation to budget balancing to women's rights, in which Mitt Romney has troubled himself with the truth or consistency? Or on the stump. Friday, I think it was, I sat and listened to Romney lie at a rally--and I mean outright, brazenly lie--for a solid 15 minutes: Obama had doubled the deficit, he said, and slashed Medicare, he continued, and so it went, one utterly despicable falsehood after another. All it lacked was a promise to rescind the Treaty of Versailles.

I have never witnessed, never read of, never studied such a dishonorable American presidential campaign as Mitt Romney's. It is vulgar, it is barbaric, and yes, in its tactics, it is Hitlerian. I know there's a kind of journalistic law that condemns all such comparisons as recklessly hyperbolic. Frankly, I don't care. Because in Romney's case, it's the truth--and journalists should have been reporting the broad obscenity of it in "news articles, tweets, and other media" all along.

Comments

[japa21]

But if they had been reporting it all along the contest wouldn't be near as close (although Romney would still be in the 45% range, though no higher.)

The real question is if they have left it to too late. Not so much for Romney, because I am confident he is going to lose, but in terms of down ticket races.

[Jon Ponder]

I think part of it is that Chrysler gave them cover but issusing a statement saying it was not true.

[KBurns]

You know, if the press just watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. . . . they could very easily report on the out right lies easily. The shows do the research and they just have to be stenographers and report what they see on the shows as the shows expose the outright lies and contradictions with actual video from the candidates. Real news; just document the words, dates, and events. Summarize. Daily. . . just a thought.