Corporate Media Finally Figures Out Fredy Burgos Was Voted Off VA GOP Central Committee This Weekend

It’s really amazing how lame the corporate media is. There are so many examples of why this is the case – false equivalency, “both-sidesism,” sensationalism, click-bait, etc, etc. – but here’s a recent one with Virginia relevance.

This Saturday, while millions across the country marched for our lives, the Virginia GOP (per Bearing Drift, which unlike the corporate media, actually covered – live blogged, even! – this weekend’s VA GOP State Central Committee meeting), was busy expelling notorious extremist and bigot Fredy Burgos from its party “leadership,” using that word loosely. Note that Burgos has been a bigoted extremist for years, yet continued to serve on the VA GOP’s State Central Committee. So what changed? I’m not sure exactly, but apparently Burgos’ recent anti-Semitic outburst was too much, even for the VA GOP. Congratulations, I guess, except seriously, what took you guys so long? All those years of anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, racist and fascistic (e.g., pro-Pinochet!) rhetoric was okey-dokey with John Whitbeck (who himself was nailed for an anti-Semitic “joke” back in 2013 by Ken Cuccinelli, of all people) and company, it seems — but this was a bridge too far.

Anyway, the corporate media is just catching up to this not-so-breaking news, which had been weeks in the making and which (again) took place on Saturday. For instance, check out the Washington (Com)Post’s breathless report this afternoon – two days after Burgos’ expulsion – which writes that Burgos “was voted off the State Central Committee over the weekend, a state party spokesman said Monday.” LOL, ya think?

And then there’s The Hill, going for the clickbait and misreporting that “Virginia Republicans voted Monday to force Fredy Burgos off of the State Central Committee just weeks after a controversial Facebook post drew accusations of anti-Semitism.” Yes, The Hill said this happened TODAY, when in fact it happened Saturday. Whatever! LOL

Of course, if the corporate media simply followed Virginia political bloggers – Bearing Drift’s Twitter feed, Blue Virginia’s Twitter feed, etc. – they would have known all this on Saturday, when it happened. But of course that would be soooo hard, just like linking and crediting to Virginia political blogs is soooo hard (snark).

The problem, of course, is that in addition not finding out important news until days after it happens, the corporate media also gets stuff wrong all the time, such as claiming that the Virginia GOP State Central Committee met TODAY, not Saturday, to expel Fredy Burgos. Or how about an even bigger example – Dave Brat’s amazing upset of Eric Cantor – which we wrote about back in 2014?

First of all, a bit of an I told you so. Many of our national pundits keep saying that “No one saw this coming.” While this is certainly unexpected, I wouldn’t say “no one say it coming.” Instead I would say that the national media, like Eric Cantor’s campaign, did not see it coming. Many locals did see it coming. Even I wrote a post two years ago that summarized Cantor’s vulnerability (though I published the post several months later.) And a month ago  local bloggers were still emphasizing Cantor’s unpopularity. 

Or as I wrote at the time:

Reading the news this morning, I happened upon this article in the Washington Post, about how “Dave Brat was mostly ignored by political reporters” and how “Perhaps not since the Chicago Daily Tribune’s infamous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline has the political press been so badly blindsided by an election result.” Well, yeah, “political reporters” – the ones who work for a salary at corporate media outlets, that is – DID overwhelmingly miss this growing story over the past few months. Why? There are a bunch of reasons, but a big one is that they apparently didn’t read the Virginia political blogs, several of which did a superb job on this race and the events leading up to it. For instance, here’s some coverage the “blindsided” political journalists might have wanted to peruse the past few weeks/months (note: these are just a few leading examples in Virginia; there are many others, including nationally, I’m sure)…

So yet again, the corporate media is wayyyy behind the Virginia political blogs, and also with far less detail and accuracy. Yet the corporate media has the big bucks to advertise, and we don’t, so I guess they’re what most people read. When it comes to Virginia politics, that’s unfortunate; at least, that is, if you want to be well informed about what’s going on and not continually surprised at shit a lot of us have been chatting about for months…