Who knew that Sue Ann Nivens’ alter ego*, The Kitchen Guy, is also acting as interim news director for Max Media’s KFBB these days?

All pretense of journalistic ethics was abandoned last week when the obviously biased news show dug up a personal photo of a Republican candidate from deep in her Face Book albums in order to provide visual contrast against the Democrat candidate in a feature on the race.

My buddy Tom over at Rockin’ on the Right Side postulated that perhaps it was some kind of “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” that resulted in the embarrassingly biased video clip used in a story designed to glorify the Democrat candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction. Nay, not so. The tasteless, tacky, petty, and juvenile attempt to skew a story for political advantage was so heavy-handed that no semblance of innocent naiveté can be ascribed to the piece.

What, pray tell, motivated this obnoxious bit of yellow journalism? I started with a little background search on the news director, Jim Gray – aka “The Kitchen Guy”:

“Chef Jim is well-known as the star of the weekly TV series, “Kitchen Guy.” His experience in television isn’t just limited to his culinary career; he also worked as a news anchor for an NBC affiliate and in the White House press corps for a financial newswire.

And what do you know – he lives in Missoula and has contributed exclusively to democrat candidates in the past and again this year. [You can look this up yourself. It’s public record.]

What do you think are the chances that the interim news editor, with years of news experience, just happened to choose that particular photo because it was the only one he could find in the public domain? Yeah – Slim and None, ’cause Fat just left.

In his lame response to the Welch campaign, Gray offered this excuse, “This was the only photo we could find of Ms. Welch, as we had no file video of her and we had a deadline crunch.”

A simple Google search took less than a half a second to return almost 20,000 images, several on the first page that were from Sandy’s campaign media kit – which Mr. Kitchen Guy obviously and deliberately chose not to use. Until KFBB’s gratuitous use of the Halloween picture, it would have taken several minutes to search Sandy’s personal FB account to find the album containing that shot. I know – I did the search. Deadline crunch??? That story smells like three-day-old fish in the kitchen garbage. Phewee!!!!

Apparently though, someone at the station had enough sense to realize just how far over the line the piece was and a more appropriate picture was edited in for the later program. Kudos for that.

However, for those of you who thought it was only the print media in Montana that leans left, let me assure you – liberal media bias is alive and well in TV-land too, and it’s a recipe for a dish that leaves Montana voters sick.

Word to the wise – when partaking of the entrees served up by the LSM, be it national or local, it always pays to remember that the quality of the ingredients will determine the edibility of the stew.

*Although Sue Ann presented an image of a sweet, perfect wife and homemaker on-screen, she was actually sardonic, man-obsessed, and very competitive… Always with her trademark dimpled smile, she was cruel and snide toward people she did not like or considered a threat.