Meet One of America's Worst Election 2012 Hack Reporters: Chris Cillizza taken apart

[Mira]

Meet One of America's Worst Election 2012 Hack Reporters
AlterNet/By Ian Murphy


The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has a problem. He's the type who unironically referred to Bush's plan to let Wall Street pillage Social Security as “reform.” He now says [3] that Paul Ryan's mission to replace Medicare with coupons-of-lesser-value is a “plan to reinvigorate [3]” the program. On MSNBC, he said the probably-won't-be Veep's now-infamous slew of RNC lies were merely facts “out of context.” All the tragic, familiar signs are there. Hell, even his blog is called The Fix. Like so many poor souls of his lost journalistic generation, Chris Cillizza is addicted to bullshit. 

So how does Chris Cillizza stack up as a journalist? Well, he's about 6'3”. 



You see, Cillizza's “How President Obama’s acceptance speech stacked up — in 1 chart [4]” rates Barry's performance in minutes and seconds (38:23), so you may now guffaw. Sure, charts are fun, and the duration of past convention speeches is harmless trivia, so it may seem to the casual news consumer that I'm picking nits. But the misleading title, innocuous in this case, is typical of Cillizza's depraved MO. Though he writes, “There seems to be little correlation between speech length and victory,” he simply cannot resist disingenuously framing the data in terms of its potential electoral impact. Advertise one thing, fail to deliver, and churn out content while imparting nothing of use: This is why Cillizza earns the big bucks.

Earlier this year, the Times then Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, asked [5] whether reporters should be “truth vigilantes,” rather than professional regurgitators. The common sense chorus answered: “Duh!” Paul Ryan's epic RNC dishonesty forced the national press to, yet again, reexamine what their job actually entails. That this phony objectivity vs. real objectivity “debate” endures explains so much—why civilization is screwed, for example. Real Americans™ understand that the news media's sole duty should be sorting fact from fiction, not acting as shameless stenographers. Cillizza represents a class of elitist wankers who're so far up their own asses that they'd rather wax epistemological than actually subject themselves to the lowly task of journalism.

Here's what he told [6] Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast (Tina Brown's most productive hack-factory):“What’s hard is that people, particularly partisans, assume that there is a white and a black on everything, that the ‘truth,’ the ‘fact,’ is crystal clear—when in fact even with facts, there are gray areas…You’ve seen fact-checkers actually come under scrutiny.”

the whole piece:
http://www.alternet.org/media/meet-one-americas-worst-election-2012-hack-reporters?akid=9462.254620.RekT0A&rd=1&src=newsletter718206&t=11

[Blue_Tires]

1. Brilliant...

[Enrique]

2. well deserved takedown

Cilizza is awful.

[Surya Gayatri]

3. Chris Cillizza: smarmy, unctuous sleaze-bag.

Andrea Mitchell Greespan's favorite go-to "contributor", i.e. butt-boy.

Serious journalism? He wouldn't know it if it bit him in the ass.

[Myrina]

4. Is he still a regular on MSNBC?

Oops.

[flamingdem]

5. He's ubiquitous

Everyone seems to call on the guy in the morning time slots