I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Demonization campaigns – typically short on facts and long on hate – seem to have made the leap from our e-mail boxes to the campaign trail, this time with Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin pushing the “send” button. Her gleeful assumption of the role of attack dog – taking off the gloves and putting on the heels – has yielded disturbing results in recent days.
Her incessant talk about Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama “palling around with terrorists” prompted a shout of “Kill him!” at a recent Clearwater, Fla., rally from a Palin fanatic apparently satisfied to take her at her word, according to an account in The Washington Post.
Post reporter Dana Milbank continues that “Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness” as well:
In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.”
At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
Talking Points Memo called Milbank to get more on the Clearwater event and got an earful, including obscenities heaped upon the media that Milbank left out of his Florida dispatch. He said he and other reporters were pelted with boos after Palin attacked Couric and The New York Times in her speech, “with some saying things like ‘scr– you’ and ‘f—ing liberal media’.”
“I’ve been doing this for years, and there’s never been anything quite like this,” Milbank said, adding:
McCain has so overtly taken on the media — they’re doing it to rile the base. And lo and behold, the base is good and riled.
The media, of course, is the messenger that can dispel with pointed questions some of the myths and slander going around, which McCain and Palin trivialized as “gotcha journalism” in one of Couric’s interviews. Their discomfort in this clip is palpable.
