Joan Blades of Moveon.org, the lefty group, was on CNN Saturday, morning, talking about the recalling of Chinese-made toys. It's good that people are watching out for our safety, but it's not good that CNN is not watching out for the principle of full disclosure.
CNN didn't mention the 800-lb donkey in the room, which is that Blades is the co-founder of Moveon.org, the Democratic activist group.
Not once did it comeup. Instead, the entire on-air discussion was of her new front group, "momsrising.org," as if Blades was just a concerned mom, as opposed to the hardcore lefty politico that she is, going back to the late 90s, when her mission was to save Bill Clinton's presidency. (It's better that she wants to save kids from being poisoned than that she wants to save Bills peccadilloes, but once again, the issue is disclosure--tell the audience everything that needs to be known about the person on the air, especially when momsrising has a much larger liberal agenda, going way beyond recalling toys.)
And then after the Blades segment, the CNN anchor--I am 99% sure that it was Betty Nguyen-- went on for a while, saying how important it was for viewers to go to "momsrising.org," and how easy it was for them to do so. Just click and you can help children! (And oh, by the way, help the partisan Left.)
This was outrageously bad journalism. (But hey, This Is CNN.)
As an aside, The Cable Gamer wonders about the implications of such extreme slipperiness, moving closer to the next election. That is, if it's so easy for a bigtime Democrat, such as Blades, to assume a new identity, and to get on TV with her new group (which admits its connection to Moveon only deep inside the sight, in the seventh dense graf here, then one wonders how the regulators are going to keep track of partisan and ideological agendas of all the new players in the media.
The Cable Gamer, herself, tends to be kinda libertarian on these matters--the more free speech the merrier!--but TCG can't help but notice the hypocrisy on the left, which supports regulation and full disclosure, except when it might cramp their own portside style.
What about the red-tape writers who work at the Federal Election Commission and the regulators and campaign finance reformers--you know, the folks who gave us the McCain-Feingold Act? They've been telling us, all along, that the government needs to step in to regulate speech, so as to "clean up" politics.
But the suspicion, of course, is that those regulator-activists didn't really want to clean up politics, they just wanted to clean out Republicans.
And the incestuously dishonest connection between CNN and Moveon/Momsrising is a reminder that if the media are part of the problem, then the media sure as heck can't be part of the solution.
