The TVNewser folks caught Chris Matthews and MSNBC pulling a standard FOX News trick last night. Watch that video clip and you’ll see Chris Matthews reporting on Barack OBAMA with a picture of OSAMA Bin Laden in the news graphic. (thanks to Jack Cluth for alerting me to this story)
Matthews made a vague on-air apology a few minutes later, and this morning MSNBC said that a graphic artist had been "reprimanded", but there’s no way in hell this happened because of one rogue employee — the producer and the show’s technical director both had to have seen this before it went live on the air. I’m only surprised that Chris Matthews didn’t say "Barack HUSSEIN Obama" (or, as the anchors at FOX have taken to calling him, "B. Hussein Obama"). Get ready for a lot of this, and much, much worse, if Obama wins the nomination.
As election season rolls on, you’re going to hear more and more about push polls – a campaign trick where deliberately leading (and usually misleading) questions are posed over the phone by campaign workers representing themselves as pollsters. Push polls can be used to skew a response by providing choices that the person being polled might not otherwise make, or can simply be used as a mechanism for spreading innuendo and propaganda among likely voters. Before the primaries began, Mitt Romney’s campaign staged a push poll to make it look like some other candidate was attacking him for being a Mormon, and the Clinton campaign was accused of push polling in the South Carolina primary. The clever folks at Yankee Pot Roast have a typical push poll for you to enjoy entitled "Are You A Conservative Or A Liberal?" that sounds like it could have come directly from FOX News itself.
