And that’s no joke. Frank Miele, the top editor at the Flathead Daily Inter Lake and a frequent contributor of arch-conservative editorials which he pens under his own name, has just written an impassioned, roughly 2,000 word piece defending the birther-nut Bob Wagner and his birther bill, and firing back at Anderson Cooper on whose show Wagner appeared a few weeks ago.
Miele sees Wagner’s birther bill as eminently reasonable and necessary, and he is outraged at what he sees as Cooper’s shameful and biased treatment of Wagner. In Miele’s view, the CNN interview was an “ambush…by a left-wing extremist”, with Cooper doing nothing other than trying to insinuate that Wagner “has a vendetta against President Obama — when in fact the law would be applied equally to all candidates, and would neither target nor favor Obama.”
Rather than print multiple excerpts, I will suggest that you read the full idiotic column to fully appreciate it, but I warn you that you will shudder to think that on a daily basis, this man is the arbiter and shaper of the majority of print-news that is consumed by voters in the Flathead Valley. And there is one juicy plum, toward the end of Miele’s editorial rant, which I will definitely print here. This must have made even a good percentage of Republican readers cringe:
“If you want to take the time to research this, you will see that there is considerable reason to believe that in 1961 it would have been possible to register the birth of a baby even if he was not born in Hawaii.”
And so, even though I don’t like to say I-told-you-so, it is important that I do so here. When you all read here, back during the 2010 campaign, that the reporting in the Flathead Valley was all very pro-Republican and candidates like Derek Skees were getting free rides because the media up there were suppressing evidence of their extremism, now you know what I was talking about. The Daily Inter Lake’s political coverage must be presumed to be Fake Flathead News, all the way.
And while Miele wrote his editorial because he wanted us all to believe that it is Anderson Cooper, not Bob Wagner, who is the nut-job, in fact it is Miele and the ownership of the Daily Inter Lake who allows him to run the paper, who are the nuts-jobs.
From time to time I hear rumors of progressives with deep pockets who are sniffing around the state, trying to gage the market for a new daily newspaper, statewide, that would combat the right wing rags. The Flathead Valley should be their number one target.