No, I don’t want snarky post-Palin speech journalists “fired”

Since Friday night’s Palin speech at CSU-Stanislaus, which saw an open-mic incident take center stage with mainstream media journalists being clearly heard slamming Sarah Palin post-speech, apparently I’ve left some people with the impression that I want the journalists involved “fired.” That’s not the case.

In the immediate aftermath, and the day after, my first thought once I decided that I believed Fox40 journalists weren’t involved was that I wanted to know which journalists uttered the remarks, but not because I wanted to see them let go. It was more out of curiosity than anything else. But after sleeping on it, I came to the conclusion that “outing” the journalists wouldn’t be necessary. As I explained tonight on Twitter, my main issue is wanting to make sure people hear the remarks so they will know without a doubt that the claim that conservatives make about journalists “being biased” against then isn’t without merit. Of course, there are many journalists already on record as admitting to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but to hear such raw comments – even though they were supposed to be “off the record” – provides the purest evidence to date of just how the mainstream media views conservatives, which is to say, almost like alien creatures.

I’m glad to see that Fox News, the LA Times Top of the Ticket blog, and other MSM outlets picked up on this story. Of course, along with it came coverage from less reliable sources like Media Matters and, ugh, The View – where the usual Joy Behar bloviating took center stage, but you have to take the good with the bad, I guess.

Fox40 continues to impress with how they are staying on top of it and trying to narrow down who was and was not in the media room for the Palin speech. From their Twitter feed:

FOX40 NEWS: CSU Stanislaus says LA Times, AP, Mod Bee, TV reporters were not in media room when open mic situation happened at Palin event.

[…]

FOX40 NEWS: CSU Stanislaus media PIO suggests AV tech staff, print reporters were behind comments heard on open mic after Palin event.

RadioMatthew, who works for FOX40, also tweeted this to me, after I asked if the station was still getting a lot of feedback:

More than you can imagine. People still believe we’re involved.

Hopefully we can disprove that though. Started requesting credential info for all reporters at the event from the school.

Well, as I’ve already noted, the consistent explanation FOX40 has given about what happened and their proactive approach in the aftermath of the post-speech comments just earns them more credibility in my eyes. I hope they continue their research into what happened, and that the angry calls soon come to a halt. I can understand the anger; I just believe it is being taken out on the wrong people.

The mainstream media are allowed to have personal opinions on politics. That is not the issue. The issue is when those opinions are reflected in what is supposed to be objective reporting. There were numerous voices on that audio feed making disdainful remarks about Sarah Palin. Were their biases, in turn, reflected in their post-speech “reporting”? My money is on “yes.”