Thomas Frank's Tilted Little Yard

There's an ultra-liberal columnist by the name of Thomas Frank whose writing appears on Wednesday's in the Wall Street Journal, just below Holman Jenkins' column.

I'm not sure just when Frank was added to the paper's slate of resident editorialists, but I suspect it has something to do with Murdoch's newly-installed publisher attempting to provide a similar "balance" to the Journal's editorial staff as is found on News Corporation's Fox News cable channel.

Frank is so liberal and, no pun intended, frankly wrong on so many issues that it actually makes me wish- despite the pain- for the return of one-time Journal writer Al Hunt.

And that is no small feat.

For over a year, one of my business colleagues and I have discussed some of Frank's more outrageous, ill-informed and out-of-touch with reality pieces. But this past Wednesday, Frank finally wrote something about which I apparently have more knowledge than him, and, is truly a total misrepresentation of reality.

The subject in question, to use Frank's own title, is "Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere."

Frank's misinformation begins with the editorial's featured quote in the middle of the piece,

"The White House has no obligation to correct willful ignorance."

Perhaps true, but totally irrelevant to the piece's title. Frank starts off totally ignorant of the chain of events leading to Beck's 'hotline.'

Here's the back story Frank either doesn't know, or won't divulge.

Beginning a few months ago, Wonderboy's administration began to demonize Fox News in a sort of head fake to get the rest of the media, and many voters, distracted from its push for the health care bill.

It began with the administration's spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, solemnly declaring that Fox isn't really a news organization, and publishes untrue stories. No specific examples were forthcoming. I believe that Wonderboy's chief of staff got in on the act, as well. Administration member Anita Dunn apparently joined the pile-on.

In an interview, Wonderboy himself mused that Fox was mostly opinion shows, not a news organization. In the past, he's threatened NewsCorp, a publicly-held company, by name as being too powerful.

Following the public media assault on Fox News, the White House began to publish its alleged identification of lies on a website. To my recollection, the only one of note was that Beck referred to the wrong city when reporting on how much money had been lost by an Olympics host. But Beck noted that the White House had taken it upon itself to be a fact checker.

Frank missed this entirely, or is simply, as many liberals are wont to do, in denial about this truth.

Beck grabbed the opportunity to ask the White House to back up its allegations that Fox News reports lies as truth. He installed the red hotline, then sent its number to Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director.

Beck was quite clear about the setup. The White House had attacked Fox News for publishing lies, and begun a website on the topic. Beck provided an easy facility for Dunn to directly communicate lies which she or other administration officials had detected on Fox News.

The phone, of course, has never rung. But it was only for the White House, and only in response to Wonderboy's team's accusation of Fox News for publishing lies, and then going so far as to start a website devoted to 'fact checking.'

Further, about a week into the hotline watch, Beck noticed that someone in the administration emailed MSNBC within an hour of some story, correcting what it believed was an untruth.

Beck again jumped on this, observing that the administration clearly felt it worthwhile to communicate directly with some media outlets, such as its favorite, left-leaning cable channel, MSNBC. True, fewer people watch MSNBC than almost any other cable channel. But Beck never the less seized on the event to point out how hypocritical and cowardly Wonderboy and his minions are behaving.

None of this relevant information appears in Frank's one-sided lambaste of Beck. Instead, he writes,

"On Monday I wrote to an old friend, Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois who has been a frequent target of Mr. Beck in recent weeks for his left-wing views and also for co-founding Free Press, an advocacy group on media policy. Did Mr. McChesney get a chance to respond on the red phone or any other way? No. "He never asked me or Free Press to call the red phone," Mr. McChesney wrote me.

Then I emailed Mark Lloyd, the Chief Diversity Officer at the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Beck has attacked Mr. Lloyd numerous times in recent weeks, repeatedly airing video clips in which he appears to hold noxious views. Did Mr. Lloyd get a chance to call the red phone? "No, no one gave me a phone number to call Beck."

Nor should Mr. Beck require a phone call from the White House to understand that lots of people, including conservatives, have cited Mao and Lenin and other such demonic figures in all sorts of contexts, and that they aren't always careful, when so citing, to point out what bad people these were. "

You can see that Frank doesn't understand, or doesn't want to understand, that Beck's hotline is only relevant for and directed at the White House, and with good reason. These other people have nothing to do with it.

Frank went on to assert,

"Consider a few of the other grand assertions tossed out by the panic-peddling host last week: that the cause of last year's financial crisis was pressure exerted by Acorn and "the people in Washington" on otherwise-reluctant mortgage lenders; that the cause of the inflation of the 1970s was President Jimmy Carter's quest for a "socialist utopia." "

This is actually true, despite Frank's desire that it not be. For proof, check yesterday's post on my business blog, in which I discuss Charlie Gasparino's new book on the topic. Gasparino is clear on assigning responsibility to government officials, including Andrew Cuomo and Barney Frank.

These are postulates that it is only possible to believe after you have utterly closed yourself off to conventional ways of knowing, after you have decided that the reporting and analysis and scholarship on these subjects are not worth reading, and that you will choose ideological fairy tales over reality until the day a magical phone call comes from on high."

Totally untrue, as you will understand by reading about Gasparino's book and numerous Journal editorials over the past year. You can even find a post on this blog devoted to quotes by liberal government officials demanding that Freddie and Fannie increase their securitization of low-income, poor-quality mortgages. ACORN and Congressionally-mandated CRA mortgage lending requirements figured large in this mess.

Frank concludes with these passages,

What Mr. Beck's silent phone really symbolizes is a new kind of ignorance, a coming high-tech dark age in which people can choose to blow off professional standards of inquiry; in which they can wall themselves off with cable TV and friendly Web sites, dismiss what displeases as liberal bias, and demand that any contrary view be transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself.

Why not let Mr. Beck and his viewers have their fun? Because ideas have consequences. Maybe, as many believe, Glenn Beck is indeed the future of the conservative movement. From tea parties to town-hall meetings, thousands are signing up and fitting themselves out with their very own hotline to nowhere. "

Thomas Frank is probably a pretty good indicator of just how clueless the liberal Democrats in this country are to the coming storm of rage from millions of centrist, independent voters, along with a conservative core of the Republican party. It's not about random hotlines. Or dismissing what, if Keith Olberman were doing it, Frank would consider to be 'investigative journalism.'

Rather than walling themselves off from anything, Beck's viewers are learning more about what conventional, liberally-biased media outlets won't investigate. Socialist members of Wonderboy's administration. Selective persecution of balanced media outlets by a fearful, cowardly White House.

Frank is on display in his recent editorial as being clueless, biased, and in denial about reality on so many levels. Not to mention having failed in his own 'investigative' piece, to learn the actual background of the story which he attempts to lampoon.