The folks at Hot Air, in commenting on media reactions to McCain’s victory in Florida, open up a controversy in several posting updates:

Update: Another exit question: Is talk radio in better or worse shape than border enforcement right now? David Brooks and Bob Novak are already crowing about the irrelevance of Romney’s comparatively hard line against amnesty. That can be spun for the moment by pointing to Florida’s big Cuban minority. Same result next Tuesday, though? Not so much.

Update (Bryan): I think Brooks and Novak are intentionally missing the point re immigration. The fact is, McCain had to publicly track to the right on that and enough voters evidently bought it, at least to the extent that it neutralized Romney’s stance.

Those voters didn’t hear about Juan Hernandez or the rest of the evidence that McCain’s conversion is insincere because the MSM didn’t report it. Talk radio didn’t do much with it either. Laura Ingraham brought it up, but I don’t think Rush or Hannity have. Novak and Brooks also fail to take into account the recent trio of immigration enforcement wins in NY, MI and MD. Those occurred under Democrat governors responding to pressure from the electorate, and the one in NY rattled the Clinton campaign for a while.

So those two are sticking to their preferred storyline, but they’re wrong.

I’m in NY, and they’re dead wrong.

Even in uber-liberal NY, downstate as well as upstate, illegal immigration is the firestorm awaiting a spark (as NY Governor Elliot Spitzer and Sen. Hillary Clinton well know). The reason it hasn’t gotten traction is that neither Romney, McCain, Huckabee, nor Giuliani have picked up on its flammability. It hasn’t figured in the Republican race thus far, thanks to candidates who can only cover it properly with evasion, flip flopping, or “squishiness,” with aiding and abetting media.

The hyper-reaction to Governor Spitzer’s illegal alien licensing plan wasn’t (only) added revulsion for the new Governor, piggy-backing on his Trooper Gate fiasco. Likewise, Clinton’s furious backpedaling and hapless muddling after initially backing the rookie Guv, wasn’t just her inability to hone her message just right. Both retreated, reluctantly, because the public reaction in the blue-bastion Empire State approached red-faced rage.

If Romney starts beating McCain and Clinton with any version of the Amnesty Stick, that could become the club with which he beats both to a pulp.

If McCain ultimately gets the nomination, he would be well advised to keep tracking rightward of his previous positions, and stay right. If he doesn’t, watch Clinton move decisively to his right, and win.

(Via Memeorandum)

Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post, provides a perfect illustration of how the New York Times intentional distorts fact in their reporting in service to their partisan agenda. Few examples of media deceit are this obvious.

Here’s the Times dishonesty to which Krauthammer refers. (He uses the gracious word mendacity, but the rest of us know it as lying. Liberals and Democrats of course reserve that term of art to political disputes in which honest people disagree as to what facts mean or indicate, and only when it suits their politics.)

But the campaign for legalization does not stop at stupidity and farce. It adds mendacity as well. Such as the front-page story in last Friday's New York Times claiming that "a large majority of Americans want to change the immigration laws to allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status."

Sounds unbelievable. And it is. A Rasmussen poll had shown that 72 percent of Americans thought border enforcement and reducing illegal immigration to be very important. Only 29 percent thought legalization to be very important. Indeed, when a different question in the Times poll -- one that did not make the front page -- asked respondents if they wanted to see illegal immigrants prosecuted and deported, 69 percent said yes.

I looked for the poll question that justified the pro-legalization claim. It was Question 61. Just as I suspected, it was perfectly tendentious. It gave the respondent two options: (a) allow illegal immigrants to apply for legalization (itself a misleading characterization because the current bill grants instant legal status to all non-criminals), or (b) deport them.

The other dishonesty revealed in this example is the widespread phenomena of partisan and political agenda driven pollsters intentionally devising polls with ambiguous or loaded questions like these, that they design precisely to pre-salt an inevitable result. That gives them a guaranteed result that appears to lend objective truth to the lie they construct. That’s deceit, and the editors at the Times know it.

Is deceit too strong a word for what the Times tried to pull off? I don’t think so. They and their editors no doubt read through the results of the poll in question. They knew what they wanted to find out of the results, they knew what they didn’t like. So they twist the most unrepresentative finding of a single horrendously written poll question to frame a story they want to tell, contrary to overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

All the news that’s fit to print, not. Rather, news made to fit, any which way we can.

(Via Memeorandum)