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From this Wednesday evening's coverage of the Republican National Convention on MSNBC, Chris Matthews talks to Lawrence O'Donnell, Michael Steele and Howard Fineman following Paul Ryan's speech to get their opinion of it. Both Lawrence O'Donnell and Howard Fineman heap praise on Ryan's political skills and O'Donnell proclaims that the fact checking on Ryan's lie filled speech won't matter to swing voters.

The analysis from all of them was basically that facts don't matter if people like what they hear and don't know the difference on whether they're being lied to or not and that the Democrats had better get busy with rebutting this stuff. While I agree with them as far as low information voters and whether it's even possible to get through to them and that the Democrats do indeed need to rebut this stuff, here's my beef.

Isn't that exactly O'Donnell and Fineman's job to be pointing out the lies along with the rest of their cohorts in the media? Aren't they supposed to be a backstop against the politicians being allowed to just lie to us constantly and the voters not knowing the difference? I think it's an indictment on what's left of our fourth estate that they didn't even consider the possibility that if we had enough "fact checkers," and accurate ones and not those that are too often making a mockery of that term, but if we had enough push back from a media that did its job instead of always playing the Fox "fair and balanced" game, maybe we wouldn't have so many low information voters and so many swing voters who are easily duped by the likes of Ryan.

What killed me is they did spend some time fact checking a few of Ryan's lies during the segment, but I left some of that out of the clip for the sake of brevity, but basically they were pointing out Ryan's lies and at the very same time claiming that it was somehow a useless endeavor. If anyone wants to check out a very long list of the better part of Ryan's lies during his speech, you can find those at Think Progress' live blog from this Wednesday: ThinkProgress Live Blogs The Republican National Convention. The list is so long, it's staggering.

Ryan and Romney should not be given a pass by our media for lying. The entire Romney campaign has been based on one lie after another, as Steve Benen has taken the time to document in his series, the latest of which you can read here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXXI. They've gotten away with it so far. The question is whether they're going to be allowed to continue to do so through the rest of the campaign. I'd say the answer is yes after listening to O'Donnell and Fineman pretend their hands are collectively tied to do anything to stop it. Instead they played the same "fair and balanced" game we see on Fox where they bother to point out the lies and for "balance" Michael Steele sits there and muddies the waters with bulls**t.

And this from that so-called "liberal" network, which is not liberal but the right wingers will constantly pretend it is, MSNBC.

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The chairman of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s national steering committee on Tuesday angrily shouted for a CNN anchor to "put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead" after she tried to fact check Republican claims about Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) plan to overhaul Medicare.

CNN's Soledad O'Brien pointed out to Romney surrogate John Sununu that the candidate's plan would turn Medicare into a voucher system much like the budget proposal offered by his vice presidential pick, Paul Ryan.

"It's sounds awfully like the Paul Ryan Medicare plan," O'Brien noted after reading details from Romney's website.

"But it's very different," Sununu insisted. "For example when [President Barack] Obama gutted Medicare by taking $717 billion out of it, the Romney plan does not do that. The Ryan plan mimicked part of the Obama package, the Romney plan does not. That's a big difference."

"I understand that this is a Republican talking point because I've heard it repeated over and over again," O'Brien observed. "These numbers have been debunked, as you know, by the Congressional Budget Office. ... I can tell you what it says. [Obama's plan] cuts a reduction in the expect rate of growth, which you know, not cutting budgets to the elderly. Benefits will be improved."

"Soledad, stop this!" Sununu shouted. "All you're doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there."

"I'm telling you what Factcheck.com tells you, I'm telling you what the CBO tells you, I'm telling you what CNN's independent analysis says," the CNN host explained.

"Put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead when you do this!" the frustrated surrogate shot back.

"You know, let me tell you something," O'Brien said. "There is independent analysis that details what this is about. ... And name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being 'stolen' from Medicare, that's not true. You can't just repeat it and make it true, sir."

After Romney on Saturday announced that he had selected Ryan as the vice presidential nominee, a campaign memo sought to distance the presidential candidate's plan from Ryan’s budget proposal, insisting that "as president he will be putting together his own plan."

But on Monday, Romney refused to say where his plan differed from Ryan's vision of turning Medicare into a voucher system.

"My plan for Medicare is very similar to his plan for Medicare," the former Massachusetts governor told reporters in Miami. "My plan, like his, really expands Medicare Advantage. It says, let's give people more opportunity to take advantage of not just the standard Medicare, but also the [private insurance] policies that are available in the market place."

(h/t: Mediaite)

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Dave already wrote about this last week where the crew at Fox & Friends were attacking the Girl Scouts, claiming they were conspiring to "promote a clear liberal ideology" because they included Media Matters in one of their publications:

Fifteen-year-old Sydney Volankski, who left the Girl Scouts in 2010 to write about their "pro-abortion mindset" on her blog, has now discovered that a guide published by Girl Scouts of the USA (GUSA) advises scouts to check media facts through a number of sites including Media Matters, which Fox News host Steve Doocy called "clearly a lefty blog."

Glenn Beck's website The Blaze first hyped the latest claims against the Girl Scouts after they were contacted by Volankski's mother.

"Perhaps the Girl Scouts staffers were too busy to respond to us, but considering the fact that the Media Matters reference is, in itself, a form of misinformation, bias — potentially even indoctrination — we assumed that the book would no longer be on the market," The Blaze's Billy Hallowell wrote. "We were wrong."

As their one liberal (and always outnumbered) panelist, Jehmu Greene pointed out on Fox News Watch this week and as Dave did last week, the other larger story here is that this girl that Fox had on as a guest last week on Fox & Friends is trying to take down the Girl Scouts, claiming that they're a "pro-abortion" organization for wanting to give their members accurate information about women's reproductive rights. Here's more on that from Dave's post last week:

The former scout has also written that "role models GSUSA encourages girls to emulate include pro-abortion champions, Marxists, Socialists and advocates of same sex lifestyle."

While the national Girl Scouts organization does maintain a neutral position on reproductive rights, local and regional chapters have the autonomy to partner with groups like Planned Parenthood for educational purposes.

"In some areas of the country, Girl Scout troops or groups may choose to hold discussions about human sexuality and may choose to collaborate with a local organization that specializes in these areas," GSUSA said in a statement earlier this year. "The topic is discussed from a factual, informative point of view and does not include advocacy or promotion of any social or religious perspective."

For his part, the National Review's Rich Lowry continued to beat that drum during this segment. And panelist Jim Pinkerton chimed in that if the Girl Scouts had just included Brent Bozell's right wing rag, The Media Research Center, which is just as much of a propaganda arm of the Republican Party and the right wing as Fox "News" he would have been just fine with the publication including Media Matters as well.

The only proof anyone on the panel offered up as to why Media Matters should not have been included in the publication is because they're a "far left" organization that receives money from George Soros, so of course the Fox panelists claimed they therefore can't be trusted. Never mind that the real reason they hate them is they've got a laser focus on the misinformation that's being spread over at Fox.

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CNN's John King asks his guests James Carville and Mary Matalin to fact check these statements by Michele Bachmann in her response to the State of the Union address yesterday.

BACHMANN: Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.

King actually bothers to start pointing out that her statement about the IRS agents is just not true and when he asks Matalin to weigh in, she pulls out the pity card for Bachmann and claims that liberals are attacking her because they just want to shut her up. She also asserts that it's the Democrats that are propping her up on some equal footing with the president. Sorry Lady McCheney, but it's the tea partiers and your network that decided to do that when airing her response. I agree with your husband, keep her crazy ass out there talking.

They also never bothered to point out that it was George Bush, not Barack Obama that signed the energy bill that changed the standard on lightbulbs. Matalin was too busy pulling out the victim card for Bachmann.

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From Countdown Nov. 17, 2009, Keith fact checks Sarah-Barracuda's latest round of lies while promoting her new book.

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Chris Matthews seems to think that bloggers don’t do any fact checking, and that we’re going to lose that if the newspaper industry goes out of business. While it’s true that beat reporters and those doing the footwork out there are sorely needed, to say that bloggers don’t fact check is just a cheap shot at the on line community that he and his ilk have such disdain for, probably because we’re the main ones fact checking the likes of him.

What Matthews fails to note here is why the industry is in such bad shape. The Economist lays out some of the problems in their article Who Killed the Newspaper.

Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

Ironically we see Bob Woodward saying journalism lives on after playing stenographer for the Bush crowd to get some books sold rather than reporting on what he found out. And he holds up Tina Brown’s operation at The Daily Beast as a business model for making money on line and some hope for journalism's future.

Just how different would this conversation have been with a completely different panel? The viewers might have learned something had it been our own Dave Neiwert and Susie Madrak who’ve worked in the newspaper industry and turned to blogging instead, and Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo and Eric Boehlert from Media Matters, who’s sites look more like the future of journalism to me.

When the fourth estate doesn't do its job, people are going to turn to other sources that will. Something that seems to completely elude Chris Matthews and his panel here.

Another thing Matthews fails to note is that most bloggers who use other people’s reporting link back to that material and allow their readers to evaluate their assertions for themselves. We are not just taking stenography from press releases or other people’s reporting. And when we get something wrong, there’s generally a swift retraction. Something you cannot say for too many in our “mainstream media” who tend to circle the wagons rather than admit mistakes. And while Joe Klein is claiming that his commenters “fact check” him, just how many of those comments does he actually read?

Transcript below the fold.

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