Home » , , , , » No Good Deed Goes Unpunished -- And Mark Shanahan Still Manages to Show His Liberal Bias

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished -- And Mark Shanahan Still Manages to Show His Liberal Bias

Written By mista sense on Saturday, April 26, 2008 | 5:49 AM


The Cable Gamer will admit that she had never heard of The Boston Globe's Mark Shanahan. Yes, I try to follow the cable news biz as closely as I can, and yes, Shanahan writes about TV and entertainment and whatnot, but he had never crossed into my radar screen.

I guess the p.r. folks at Fox cast a wider net when it comes to inviting people to their gala dinners, and so they invited Shanahan--and now they know better.

Why? Because Shanahan knows how to put a knife--or in his case, it's probably more like a hair pin--in the back of those who are nice to him. In this case, the victim was Fox News. Shanahan wrote a remarkably bitchy, self-pitying first-person account of his being invited to the Radio-Television Correspondents Association dinner in DC last Saturday night in which he demonstrated that even bitchiness can be unfair and unbalanced.

Here's the proof. Shanahan and his editors, playing up the victim, headlines his story "Stranded in Fox's lair"--as if he is some poor little lost lamb, surrounded by slobbering carnivores. In fact, he was invited, and he accepted Fox News' hospitality--a mistake that they surely won't make twice.

Read the piece for yourselves, Cable Gamers, and decide for yourselves whether or not Shanahan was simply looking for every opportunity to make Fox News look bad--although, in fact, he makes himself look bad. Not only does he look ungrateful for the invitation, but he can't even spell Alisyn Camerota's name correctly.

TCG wasn't there at the dinner, but something tells me that Shanahan was a pill at the dinner table. And so little wonder he was not invited to whatever after-parties the Fox types were going to. But let Shanahan tell it:

As the room emptied, I roamed around, running into Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, "NewsHour" anchor Jim Lehrer, and "Hardball" host Chris Matthews. Bored, I texted my friends at Fox. "Where's the party?" No answer. "Doing anything fun?" Silence. Hmm. I'd been dropped. I headed to the hotel bar to catch the highlights of the Red Sox game, and on the way passed conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham fixing her lipstick.


Note that Shanahan is both a one-man sob sister act, but he is always willing to name names, snarking not only at Ingraham, above, but also other big Fox cheeses, including Chris Wallace , Geraldo Rivera, and Shepard Smith.

But now note where Shanahan suddenly falls silent:

Then I bumped into a well-known political operative from Massachusetts, who was enjoying a drink with an attractive young woman. "Is this your wife?" I asked. No, he replied. We swapped stories for a while longer, and then I left. I had to get up early and he was busy Spitzering.

Now, let me ask the blogospheric jury: If you're writing a gossipy piece about a bigfoot dinner, wouldn't you want to name the name of the "well-known political operative from Massachusetts, who was enjoying a drink with an attractive young woman"? If you can dish on Fox, why can't you dish on this political operative?

And the answer of course is that the likes of The Boston Globe regard Fox News as conservative and thus the enemy (never mind that Wallace, Rivera, and Smith are notoriously neutral, maybe even slightly liberal).

Whereas any "well-known political operative from Massachusetts" is surely a Democrat, and so the Globe can't name him--that would be an assault on "privacy," to which liberals have a constitutional right, but not, of course, conservatives.

Bitchiness is bad--OK, I take that back, it's not all bad, actually it's kinda fun sometimes. But biased bitchiness is bad.

If you're going to be a bitch, be an equal opportunity bitch.

Blog Archive

Popular Posts

Ad

a4ad5535b0e54cd2cfc87d25d937e2e18982e9df

Ad