As befits its current Romney-shilling mode, Newsmax was eager to portray Paul Ryan as the winner of his debate with Joe Biden. Shortly after the debate, Newsmax went with this rah-rah story by Martin Gould, under the headline ”Grinning Biden Fails to Throw Ryan Off Course”:
A grinning Joe Biden became the overwhelming image of Thursday’s vice presidential debate as he made a conscious effort to undermine virtually every point his rival Paul Ryan made.
“Malarky,” “bunch of stuff,” “loose talk,” “not true,” “let me translate that” “not mathematically possible,” “this is amazing,” he said of various points Ryan made during the 90-minute debate.
But Ryan refused to be bowed by the older man’s attempts to talk down to him and belittle his points, hitting Biden with a torrent of detailed figures.
Newsmax promoted this article with a large top-of-the-front-page graphic (above).
Strangely, though, this article no longer exists on the Newsmax website. The link where the article originally resided now contains what appears to be a heavily rewritten version of the story credited to “Newsmax Wires,” which claims that Biden’s “grinning, laughing and disrespectful performance was panned by commentators and pollsters.” The article’s original lead now appears several paragraphs down.
The original article was reposted at TeaParty.org, if you want to see the first rah-rah draft.
Why did Newsmax go through all the effort to rewrite the article and not simply post a different one? It’s not like Gould’s original is more embarrassing than, say, Ronald Kessler’s creepy fawning over Ann Romney. Seems like a lot of work for not very much payoff.
Then again, we’re not partisan shills, so what do we know?