The job title says it all
If I had to pick a poster child for vague beltway doublespeak — the kind that can only be learned if one has adopted the inane title of “political analyst” — NPR’s Mara Liasson would be a prime candidate.
Each Monday she appears on NPR’s Morning Edition, and it’s as if a news producer has passed a baton and told her to Go Forth! and report a political horse race where none exists. Egged on by a too-eager NPR anchor, Liasson enshrouds herself in a world where the Iraq war is a political positive for Republicans while constantly using the words “some polls” to assert trends that every single poll in existence contradicts. She has convinced herself that she understands the Everyman American when in reality she is nothing but a ventriloquist to a legion of straw men.
Still though, she is largely unknown to those who aren’t NPR junkies (whereas media figures like Bill Oreilly and Keith Olbermann are known by people who don’t watch them), and that’s why I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t the only one who noticed that her political commentary was particularly imbecilic. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald wrote today about her hastily drawn caricatures of American values.
