Hat tip to NewsBusters:
Just before 8 am Eastern time on the Tuesday edition of CNN’s American Morning, anchor John Roberts interview Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, and something unusual happened. After a battery of questions from Roberts suggesting Joe was throwing John McCain “under the bus,” Joe shot back that the media does that to candidates it supports. Roberts took offense, since “I’m a journalist,” and Joe laughed at that. Roberts insisted Joe should not cast aspersions against him, and Joe said he didn’t mean to attack Roberts personally. (He should have said “I’m sure the Media Research Center has a thick file of your biased remarks.”) Here’s how the exchange went:
ROBERTS: But if you disagreed with some of his policies, why were you out there on the campaign trail supporting him?
WURZELBACHER: Do you agree with every candidate and your candidate’s policies?
ROBERTS: Hey, I’m not out there stumping for anybody, I’m a journalist. (Joe laughs heartily)
WURZELBACHER: I’ll leave that one alone.
ROBERTS: No, seriously.
WURZELBACHER: You know I was out there, I told everybody, Obama’s —
ROBERTS: Excuse me, Joe. Why would you cast aspersions on my journalistic integrity. I don’t even know you?
WURZELBACHER: [Pause] Oh, I wasn’t — you specifically, and in general some of the media, you know is very slanted to the left. You personally, John, I don’t know you, I don’t mean to cast any kind of bad things about you, brother.
ROBERTS: All right.
WURZELBACHER: I just, you know, in general you can say the left pretty much shot me up, wouldn’t you say?
ROBERTS: Well, I mean, you know, I guess when you entered the political fray, you’ve got to expect that some people are going to take some shots at you, you know, when you get out there and you enter into that political arena. It’s a tough place to be. It’s a little bit like a gladiator sport —
WURZELBACHER: Oh, absolutely.
ROBERTS: And you are going into the coliseum.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/12/23/joe-plumber-laughs-cnn-anchor-who-insists-hes-fair-hes-not-pro-obama
Journalistic integrity? That’s the mother of all oxymorons. The MSM has no integrity. They were so far into the tank for Obama, they may as well have been his campaign HQ. I’d have not only laughed in Roberts’ face, but I’d have offered him the chance to think it over before I embarrassed him by citing all the examples of bias.
Another thing: The Obamessiah approached Joe on HIS OWN PROPERTY during a campaign stop and got confronted by an ordinary citizen who called him on his Marxist economic ideas.
If the media spent as much time researching Obama’s communist political roots as they did propping up his campaign, they might have understood why a lot of working class people are not enthusiastic about his ‘spread the wealth’ policy.
Journalistic integrity…what a fucking joke. Don’t pull that effete crap with the average Joe or Jane without expecting a good laugh.