Too bad to check: Memo shows network plans to slant coverage of GOP convention? Update: Nah

posted at 4:32 pm on August 5, 2008 by Allahpundit
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As Sullivan once infamously said, I’m not endorsing it, merely “airing” it. I have no doubt Powerline’s offering it in good faith, but what may look like an authentic memo isn’t necessarily an authentic memo. Doesn’t this sound a wee bit … Snidely Whiplash-ish?

Tuesday

With Bush out of the way, Republicans will turn to what they do best — bashing the opposition. The heavy guns will be trained on Obama and it will become imperative that we capture the raw hatred, and dare I say envy, that the delegates will manifest. Close-up shots and interviews with the meanest looking (and “largest”) delegates are strongly encourage. If a delegate seems too restrained, pose well-phrased questions such as: “Are you bothered by the fact that Obama doesn’t look like the presidents on our paper money?” and “Do you think an Obama presidency will restore our image overseas?”

It is not our place, of course, to attribute the rabid hatred these delegates feel towards Obama to race. But viewers may be able to connect the dots if we intersperse our coverage with film clips of Bull Conner, old-time Alabama state troopers (preferably “large”), and the hosing and beating of black protesters in the early 1960s.

They’re supposedly planning to re-run Obama’s speech both before and after McCain’s too, something I can’t remember ever seeing in convention coverage, and they may cut away intermittently for … a Major League Soccer match. The whole thing reads like a satire of conservatives’ worst suspicions of big media, pushed a few yards beyond the line of plausibility but close enough to it to make people wonder. Between the heavy-handed racial demagoguery and the idea that any network exec would be stupid enough to commit this to print, color me extremely skeptical. But read it and decide for yourselves.

Update: Powerline updates and reveals the dark provenance of this dastardly document. BS detection systems functioning at proper capacity. Whew.

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