Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Crucify Her!

In twenty years, if that’s all they’ve got on this person, they really have to be pulling out all the stops to persecute her. I wonder what the Democrats have on the editors of the Star-Bulletin?

http://starbulletin.com/2005/09/27/news/index2.html

Lingle’s pick has criminal record
State Rep. Bev Harbin was found guilty of passing bad checks

By Richard Borreca mailto:Borrecarborreca@starbulletin.com

The record of Harbin's conviction was found by searching the public file of the Criminal Justice Data Center, which is administered by the attorney general.

According to the data center record, Harbin was found guilty of three counts of "negotiating a worthless instrument." On Oct. 5, 1987, Harbin was given a suspended six-month sentence, but could have faced up to a year in jail. The three counts were considered misdemeanors, which would not prevent her from serving in the Legislature.

"The media circus that began with my appointment to the vacant seat in the 28th Representative District seems to be sustaining its momentum," she wrote. "My inclination is to ignore it and address the issues that face the district."

3 Comments:

At September 27, 2005 9:40 PM, Blogger Mike Hu said...

http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/4032_0_2_0_C/

Media Bias Out in the Open

By Cliff Kincaid | September 28, 2005

One of the best analysts of the bias is, not surprisingly, a Republican.

In a story about national media coverage of the government response to the Katrina hurricane disaster, the Los Angeles Times said that news coverage had "turned confrontational" as "many reporters shed their stance of neutrality and joined numerous commentators in criticizing local, state and federal officials for their seemingly slow reaction to the calamity." In fact, this story was itself biased. Most of the coverage was confrontational toward the federal government. That is, the Bush administration. And that confrontational attitude was more evidence of a bias against Republicans and conservatives.

For those who question the evidence of bias, it can be found in numerous studies. The national press bias was first documented in Leo Rosten's 1937 study of Washington correspondents. He found that the press corps at the time was significantly more pro-Roosevelt than the country as a whole, less pro-Republican and slightly more pro-Socialist. William Rivers duplicated the Rosten study 25 years later. He also found a decidedly liberal political slant to correspondents' views. He reported, "It is significant that the newspaper correspondents, like the rest of the press corps, are predominately liberal. There is little difference politically between newspapermen and other correspondents. There are nearly four times as many Democrats as Republicans among wire-service and radio and television correspondents, and nearly two times as many Democrats as Republicans among magazine correspondents."

One of the best analysts of the bias is, not surprisingly, a Republican. Former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer wrote Taking Heat, about his battles with the press. The book is full of revealing insights into the nature of the national press corps. He has fascinating comments about the CBS News attempt to discredit Bush during the presidential campaign by using a phony document about his National Guard service.

"I believe CBS aired the bogus document about Bush and the National Guard because it was too good to check, at least too good to check carefully," he said. "I think the people involved in putting the show together, including Dan Rather, thought it was probably true about Bush and let themselves be duped because they wanted the damaging information to be true. I believe if CBS had more Republicans in their newsroom, there would have been a greater tendency to check the story carefully before putting it on the air. After all, conservative bloggers caught the document's phony type almost right away."

Fleischer says the CBS smear demonstrates the need for more conservatives and Republicans in newsrooms. "Balance and ideological diversity in the newsroom are good for the news business," he says.

Of course, we hear a lot from the media about the need for diversity in the news business. But they don't mean intellectual or philosophical diversity. They mean diversity in terms of skin color, gender and even sexual orientation. And that is why the coverage of a natural disaster can be twisted by the press into a partisan matter. It's not real diversity when the journalists are mostly liberals and Democrats.

This lack of diversity helps explain why, in covering the government response to the hurricane, national reporters focused on Republican President Bush and not Democratic officials Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

 
At September 28, 2005 8:36 AM, Blogger Mike Hu said...

The editors at the newspapers are hardly the moral authorities to be delivering lectures on doing the "right thing."

 
At September 28, 2005 10:00 PM, Blogger Mike Hu said...

She's already working:

http://honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050928/NEWS01/509280359/1001

Harbin said she even might entertain resigning if every other lawmaker who ever had a tax debt or a misdemeanor conviction agreed to resign with her. Her contribution, she said, could be "the Bev bar" — a new standard for what is considered the acceptable background for someone in public office.

"I'm a perpetual scrapper," Harbin said. "I'm going to keep going."

 

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