MEDIA CESSPOOL ON DISPLAY: As I Was Saying ... AGAIN!

MEMO TO MARTIN BASHIR: PLEASE SLAP ANDREA MITCHELL DOWN. YEAH, I KNOW, NOT GONNA HAPPEN, SHE'S YOUR COLLEAGUE, but maybe you can drop her a word or two. Andrea Mitchell continues to PROPAGATE Mitt Romney's LIES. IT happened, AGAIN, TODAY as she broadcast Romney's stump speech in Pennsylvania and DID NOTHING TO CORRECT HIS LIES, even though they've been repeated TIME AND AGAIN and should be wholly familiar to any self-respecting news organization.

 So let us compare and contrast two roughly parallel political segments on Andrea's show, and her different "approach" (to coin a Luke word) to them. Last week, as emphatically stated in a couple of posts, I said Andrea "silently" hosted right wing VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli following the President's speech to basically trash it while she couldn't "even properly articulate the argument to counter the wingnut's LIES. We're not asking you to repeat talking points; just THE FACTS, MA'AM, from reliable nonpartisan sources like, e.g., the CBO. Republicans LIE consistently. Every single time they're on with Andrea Mitchell. And she says nothing. Much less act like the shadow of a journalist."

Today, Andrea reverted to the same format, broadcasting an extended portion of a Romney stump speech in Pennsylvania. I actually wondered to myself, "who will Andrea call upon on the other side to even the Cuccinelli scales?" Just half-listening to Romney's speech, I caught two FAMILIAR, OFT-REPEATED LIES right off the bat. Andrea SAID NOTHING to correct them after she cut away from the speech, given roughly the same time frame she gave the President. HERE'S THE FIRST LIE, and MARTIN BASHIR'S (PROXY) SLAPDOWN OF ANDREA MITCHELL — because, unlike his colleague and/or her staff, Martin does his DUE DILIGENCE:

HERE IS THE SECOND LIE, in which Romney keeps insisting directly from this LYING AD, CAUGHT BY POLITIFACTCHECK.ORG, that “half a billion [in stimulus funds went] to an electric car company that created hundreds of jobs in Finland.” Amazingly, rather than a surrogate for the President (all of whom, to my ears, lay off the talking points) Andrea trots out one of her POLITICO pets, Jonathan Martin, who looks ZONED OUT much of the time, to say, basically, NOTHING.

HERE'S THE REAL STORY, FROM POLITIFACTCHECK:

The Fisker loans came in two parts. The first part, according to a statement from Dan Leistikow, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, was a $169 million loan guarantee to support the development of Fisker’s first luxury electric car, called the Karma. The company has made about 1,400 of them so far (and sold 800 for about $97,000 apiece), all of them assembled in Finland. But the Department of Energy and Fisker insist the government loan money was spent exclusively in the United States “to support the engineers who developed the tools, equipment and manufacturing processes for Fisker’s first vehicle, the Fisker Karma.” According to Fisker officials, that work was done in Fisker’s U.S. facilities, including its headquarters in Irvine, Calif.,”which has 700 employees and plans to continue hiring.”

Fisker has raised over $1 billion in private equity, Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher told us. That private money was used to finance the manufacture the cars in Finland, he said, while the DOE loan was used exclusively in the U.S. for engineering, design and marketing, and sales. That supported more than 600 jobs in the U.S., he said. 

“All of the DOE loan money that we got for the Karma project had to be spent in America,” Ormisher said. [Emphasis mine.]

In addition to the $169 million, the DOE approved a much larger, $359 million loan to help Fisker develop a lower-priced version of its car, called the Nina. The plan is to build those cars at a shuttered General Motors factory in Delaware. That project has hit some snags. In February, amid delays to the project, Fisker let go 26 employees from the Delaware factory.

However, Fisker still plans to move forward with the car, and the “first option” is still to build them at the factory in Delaware, Ormisher said. If it moves forward, the plant could employ up to 2,500 workers. A prototype of the car, renamed the Atlantic, was unveiled recently, but a launch date was not announced.

To date, Fisker has drawn down $193 million of the $529 million in government loan guarantees, Ormisher said. Fisker has been negotiating with DOE since last May regarding the future of this second part of the funding. 

 My point is — and I get blue in the face repeating it, hence my anger and frustration at MSNBC — there is NO CREDIBLE EXCUSE for Andrea Mitchell, and her staff, to not just DO ROUTINE DUE DILIGENCE on the credibility of Mitt Romney's claims/LIES. Everyone, it seems, in the political world, KNOWS THE MAN IS A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR, EXCEPT ANDREA MITCHELL. Like her, a lot of them behave as if Romney's LIES are par for the course, because he KEEPS REPEATING THEM. But then Andrea keeps broadcasting Romney's LIES to hundreds of thousands of people tuning in, WITHOUT THE LEAST REGARD FOR THE CANONS OF OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM.

WHAT I SAID. Not repeating it, there's no need. But SHAME ON YOU, Andrea. And Martin, Lawrence: You've done a GREAT JOB exposing Romney's LIES. WHY ON EARTH WON'T YOU HAVE A WORD WITH ANDREA and your so-called "news" team?! In case you haven't noticed, this disgraces your profession. SELF-RESPECT, at least, demands that you speak out. EMPHATICALLY.