Updated-Loesch At Center of New Smear Campaign Against Media

Dana Loesch, the new editor of Big Journalism, has been pushing a story claiming that reporters in Alaska were "conspiring" against Sarah Palin endorsed Senate candidate Joe Miller. Palin claimed that the media were "corrupt bastards" while talking about the tapes.

However, the tapes themselves are largely incoherent and seem to be obviously devoid of context that would allow someone to know exactly what they were talking about. Here's the transcript of the tapes:


Audio KTVA -

Unsurprisingly, given Loesch and Andrew Breitbart's history, the story they are pushing appears to be false. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post posted a response from the general manager of KTVA, the media outlet accused of trying to "sabotage" Miller:

It's unfortunate that this recording has happened. It's unfortunate because it does not accurately reflect the journalistic standards of our newsroom and the garbled context will no doubt leave more questions than answers. The Miller campaign's analysis of the recording is incorrect in many material ways ranging from personnel involved in the conversation, the interpretation of conversation snippets and the reported transcript of the perceived garbled conversation.

"While the recording is real, the allegations are untrue. The recording was the result of a cell phone not being hung up after a call was placed to Randy DeSoto, Joe Miller campaign spokesperson, Thursday afternoon to discuss Joe Miller's appearance on that evening's newscast. That phone call was placed near the end of a coverage planning meeting in our newsroom regarding that evening's Miller rally in downtown Anchorage. The group of KTVA news personnel was reviewing potential "what-if" scenarios, discussing the likelihood of events at the rally and how KTVA might logistically disseminate any breaking news.

"The perception that this garbled, out of context recording may leave is unfortunate, but to allege that our staff was discussing or planning to create or fabricate stories regarding candidate Miller is absurd. The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do."

Sargent also added:

The full audio is only on the cell phone of Miller's campaign manager. Will the campaign release it? Also: Who edited the audio that Big Journalism posted?

In fact, even a Fox News reporter told Megyn Kelly that they had reviewed KTVAs record and could find no evidence of any bias against Joe Miller.

Naturally, Breitbart and Loesch don't care and are still busy ranting on Twitter about how biased the media is. In fact, Breitbart's gone completely off the deep end:

“George Soros, in his plane, a private jet, a global warming jet, flew and dropped money on Alaska on a series of left-wing bloggers and infested it, the Alaska media, with an anti-reformist agenda,” Breitbart said. “The Republican Party up there is corrupt, the media up there is corrupt, the Democratic Party up there is corrupt and George Soros has helped to sully it. This is why Sarah Palin had to step down – because they were trying to assault her using fake journalism in order to assassinate her character because they saw that she was a threat, a huge potential juggernaut.”

Anyway, just goes to show that Loesch and Breitbart will shriek and attack any news outlet without any shed of genuine evidence because that fits with their narrative and their agenda. Yet somehow, outlets like the Post-Dispatch, in spite of all available evidence, naively think that by pandering to people like Loesch they will someone win some respect from them.

Update: Media Matters nails it. If Breitbart and Loesch had the slightest concern for the truth, why wouldn't they have contacted KTVA before pushing their stories?