MSNBC is now the liberal distorter of conservative views, just as Fox has always been the conservative distorter of liberal views. When Jon Stewart claimed this equivalency in November, 2010, I disagreed.

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I have written about political rhetoric before.  In one blog I described the difference between liberal and conservative media this way:

The liberal media use the actual words of conservatives (sometimes out of context, sometimes not) to ridicule their ideas and philosophy. The right-wing media distorts the words (and beliefs) of liberals, and then ridicules them. . . In the language of debate competitions, they “prop up a straw man and knock it down.”

Here is the Romney campaign reaction to President Obama explaining the biggest mistake of his first term: Continue reading →

Now that MSNBC has exploded over President Obama’s “compromise” with Republicans, I want to return to Jon Stewart’s claim that MSNBC and Fox News are guilty of the same kind of biased journalism. In my earlier False Equivalency blog I asked readers to compare how often Fox News and MSNBC commentators prop up a “straw man,” which is the debating technique that distorts an opponent’s belief, and then ridicules the distortion.

In the earlier blog I claimed MSNBC does this much less than Fox News, making a false equivalency of Jon Stewart’s claim that the two channels do the same thing from opposite perspectives. I told Stewart that political discernment makes him funny, and he needs more discernment before making MSNBC the liberal equivalent of Fox News.
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