The news source to which I regularly listen is National Public Radio (NPR). I generally follow that up with independent Internet research because I always like confirmation. But generally I can depend on NPR for the closest thing to the truth. That is, unless Cokie Roberts is speaking. Cokie Roberts is NPR's resident conservative propagandist.

Here's an example of the Cokie Roberts Experience from the Morning Edition news show this morning. In this instance, Cokie Roberts is being employed not as a correspondent but as a news analyst. This is an important distinction, because corespondents are expected to report the facts and news analysts are free to selectively use some facts to forward personal ideological points of view. That doesn't bother me, because I am always interested in hearing different points of view. What does bother me is when the analyst lies or misleads.

This is a quote from Cokie Roberts, speaking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

In a Pew Poll last week, almost three quarters of the Blacks said they think the response would have been faster if the majority of victims were white and only a quarter of whites agreed with that. Now the fact that white--poor whites in St Bernard and Plaquemines Parish were equally distressed and arguably more abandoned in this hurricane is not really relevant to the perceptions when the pictures you've seen are almost entirely of Black Americans in New Orleans who have been in devastated circumstances and the president of course has been trying to reach out to Blacks to grow the Republican Party to a permanent majority, his Republican National chairman Ken Mellman has been very much on that case. This obviously puts that political agenda in a very difficult position and it also puts the questions of poverty and class and race back on the national agenda and that's not particularly helpful to the Republican Party because of the kinds of programs, the kind of budget cuts in programs like MedicAid they have proposed so this is going to be extremely problematic for the president and the Republican Party.

I guess what raised my antenna was her phrase "now the fact that...", which indicates that Cokie was about to state an incontrovertible fact that, in context, would disprove her previous statement, which was "Blacks said they think the response would have been faster if the majority of victims were white." The fact in question is "poor whites in St Bernard and Plaquemines Parish were equally distressed and arguably more abandoned in this hurricane" which may or may not be true, but I will give Cokie the benefit of the doubt.

What Cokie Roberts did, in fact, was made it seem that she disproved the previous statement when in fact she did nothing of the sort. A casual listener would have her her make a statement and follow it up with "now the fact that," which in that context generally means that the true facts contradict the statement. This is how propagandists work.

Blacks did not say that hurricane aid was lavished on whites while ignoring Blacks, nor did Blacks say that whites were unaffected by Hurricane Katrina. Blacks said that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were predominantly Black and that if the victims had been predominantly white then the response would have been faster and more effective. Cokie Roberts did not address that, but still managed to give the impression that she refuted it by her phraseology and carefully crafted response.

This is the kind of partisan misrepresentation of the truth that has served the Republican Party so well, and I hear it constantly from less reputable news sources such as FOX News. I hold NPR to a higher standard, though, and it irks me whenever something like this slips through.