Just another example of how its "NOT what's reported"

[sirs]

The Media's Obama Miracle
How Journalists Pretend There Aren't Any White House Scanda

On October 27, 2011, former Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter wrote a column for Bloomberg News headlined “Obama Miracle is White House Free of Scandal.” Alter began: “President Barack Obama goes into the 2012 [race] with a weak economy that may doom his reelection. But he has one asset that hasn’t received much attention: He’s honest.”

Alter even bragged: “According to a metric created by political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Obama set a record earlier this month for most days without a scandal of any president since 1977.” Nyhan’s methodology insisted that a president doesn’t have a scandal until The Washington Post calls it a “scandal” by using that precise word.

This grants nearly all the power in defining what is or is not a scandal to the Washington media elite. Congress can launch investigations, hold hearings, or otherwise make real news, but journalists have repeatedly ignored or dismissed the Obama scandals. (This also helps to keep the Obama scandals from entering the satire stream of late-night comedy shows.) 

To study the media “miracle” of scandal denial, MRC analysts reviewed the coverage – or more precisely, the stunning lack of coverage – of just a few Obama scandals and allegations, large and small, on the morning and evening news shows of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and found:

– Fast and Furious: The Obama Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious” encouraged American gun shops to sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels, which backfired as Mexican gangs shot and killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in 2010 (as well as many Mexican citizens) with guns they allowed to “walk.” While CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson filed 29 stories unspooling the scandal, ABC and NBC stayed almost perfectly silent for many months, even as Attorney General Eric Holder admitted he had misled Congress about when he learned of “Fast and Furious.” Only when Congress voted to hold Holder in contempt did they discover the story, and then it was dismissed on NBC as “vicious” and “another example of our broken politics.”

– Solyndra: In the first two months of 2002, the Big Three networks reported a stunning 198 stories on the Enron bankruptcy, often tying the fiasco to President Bush. By comparison, since declaring bankruptcy on August 31, 2011, despite a half-billion dollars in federal loans from the Energy Department through Obama donor connections, ABC, CBS, and NBC filed a grand total of 24 stories on Solyndra, and barely connected it to Obama -- even as Obama told ABC he had no regrets, and even as the promise of “green jobs” demonstrably collapsed.

– MF Global: An investment company run by former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (a major Obama fundraiser) declared bankruptcy on Halloween 2011 and admitted they lost more than a billion dollars of customer money that was supposed to be kept separately from risky investment schemes. This scandal garnered only six full stories and 16 briefs. Only NBC once mentioned Corzine was a Democrat. None even whispered any connection to Obama.

– Gibson Guitar: Some scandals are less weighty, but more interesting to viewers. Federal agents twice raided the plants of Gibson Guitar in Tennessee to investigate whether they improperly imported wood from Madagascar and India, but waited for almost a year before settling with the guitar maker for a $300,000 fine. No one found it newsworthy that Gibson’s CEO is a Republican donor, while other guitar makers who weren’t Republicans were not raided by the government over wood imports.

– Reverend Wright: After a long silence after the inauguration, as the networks pretended Obama’s longtime reverend Jeremiah Wright didn’t exist, network stories erupted in mid-May at the whisper of an idea that Republicans might exploit him in an ad. But the networks offered nothing on an interview in Ed Klein’s book The Amateur, where Reverend Wright claimed in a taped interview that Obama friends offered money for silence.

A recent Gallup survey concluded that only 21 percent of those surveyed had confidence in television news. As the nonpartisan Tyndall Report found, broadcast networks racked up 171 minutes of royal-wedding coverage and 111 minutes on the Michael Jackson wrongful-death trial on the evening news in 2011. But Obama scandal news – and hence, any notion the media act as a watchdog or a check on government – was almost nonexistent

Scandal free, my ass

[sirs]

It is not often that members of the liberal national media admit their biases. Americans know that the media is not impartial and that objectivity is not a priority when reporting on current events. Americans need and deserve a balanced media.

(disclaimer....that does not equate to sirs requiring some legislative mandate of balance.  It merely means that sirs agrees that Americans need and deserve a balanced media.  We won't get one, but it is what's needed & deserved)

The New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane gave us insight into the Times’ liberal slant in his final column after two years with the newspaper. He criticizes the Times for being “powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds.” The members of the liberal national media are surrounded by others who share their beliefs and political prejudices. This one-sided worldview leads to biased reporting that favors their views.

Which way do the newspapers and many news outlets lean politically? Many Americans already know the answer to this. Brisbane continues that “across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism…that this worldview virtually bleeds though the fabric of the Times.” He then uses issues such as gay marriage and the Occupy Wall Street movement as examples of this, which he states “seem to almost erupt in the Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.”

This is not breaking news. Eight years ago, the very first public editor of the Times, Daniel Okrent, wrote a column about the political leaning of the newspaper. Okrent agreed that a tone of “implicit advocacy” was apparent in the newspaper on social issues such as “gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others.”

Politico’s Executive Editor Jim VandeHei also admitted to the media’s bias. In his analysis of the recent media coverage of the political arena he stated, “the mainstream media tends to be quite smitten with the Obamas.” The liberal media’s bias is becoming so apparent that prominent members of the media can no longer defend the media’s impartiality. Even those who are notoriously seen as unapologetically biased like CNN’s Soledad O’Brien don’t deny the fact that bias in the national liberal media is out of control. She recently cited the administration for its tactics against Republican ideas for Medicare reform by pointing out their strategy amounts to a scare tactic aimed at seniors.

If the media were to be truly impartial, it would have
- reported more widely how the deficit just surpassed a historic $16 trillion.
- reported more widely that President Obama’s budget was voted down by every single member of the Senate on both sides of the aisle. 
- reported more widely that the auto bailout of GM and Chrysler cost taxpayers $25 billion, and that much of that money went to pay off auto unions

(additional disclaimer.....no, that does not mean that above scnearios were never reported at any time, merely that time and energy in reporting and/or repeating those facts, was never a priority)

[sirs]

I didn’t want to write this column. I definitely didn’t want to use these words. I wanted to write about something else, but after the events of this week, I had no choice.

I am here to report a rape. To protect President Obama from the failure of his administration to anticipate or respond appropriately to the attacks on our embassies in the Middle East, the media has absolutely raped the truth.

Americans were targeted and murdered by radical monsters around the globe. The president did nothing about it. The White House had at least a 48-hour advance warning this was coming. It told no one. It didn’t warn the diplomats or increase security at the embassies. It didn’t warn the complicit governments – and they are as involved in this as the mobs and murderers themselves – of potential consequences.

And when the attacks were over? The president took all of one hour of out of his busy fundraising/campaign schedule to address this matter. Then, it was off to Las Vegas and back to his rich friends to shake the money maker.

Let me be clear, every drop of blood spilled by Americans as a result of the actions of these monsters drips through the hands of this administration before it hits the ground.

There’s no need to recount the story now, except to say the president, the secretary of state and their auditioning second-term press secretaries in the media burnt more calories this week attacking an American in California for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech than they did condemning the murderous mobs or their enablers in their respective governments.

Whatever outrage they had leftover was reserved for Mitt Romney for committing the unforgivable sin of standing up for American values in the face of terrorism and speaking out against it hours before the President did. That the President’s campaign attacked Romney for standing up for American values a full 8 hours before the President condemned the attacks on and murder of Americans isn’t a story.

Until a better word is invented, disgusting will have to do

Within 48 hours of the first attacks the Justice Department had tracked down the filmmaker and leaked his name to the media. The media dutifully reported it as if they’d found an escaped Nazi. Of course that analogy doesn’t fit perfectly as escaped Nazi are granted the presumption of innocence.

After all, all the filmmaker did was make a bad movie despotic governments we helped empower could use to incite rioting and direct the anger away from their own incompetence and toward the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known. Through state controlled media, they played this unknown video endlessly and spread it throughout the region. All the while, our President skipped nearly 60 percent his national security briefings. Turns out maybe you can’t get by on the Cliff notes on those briefings. Maybe you do have to show up.

But Mitt Romney spoke first, and that was the story the media covered.

It made little mention of how the Justice Department found and outed the anonymous American supposedly “responsible” for all this in just two days but, after looking for two years, still can’t find out who authorized Fast And Furious within their own ranks.
It found no fault with the president returning to his real duties – campaigning and fundraising – after he’d devoted just an hour to the most significant security threat of his administration. Had a fiction writer scripted the media’s coverage even they wouldn’t have had the nerve to be so brazen as to attempt something so corrupt.

Now, the violence is spreading, and the president has no idea how to react. He’s sinking in concrete, campaigning and fundraising while the Middle East burns. But he thinks Mitt Romney spoke too soon? That’s it somehow a gaffe that Romney grasped the implications and the outrage of the situation a full workday before the president could be bothered even to release a statement? That’s somehow a Romney gaffe, but the President being uncertain if Egypt is our ally or not barely registers?

President Obama has learned well from great propagandists in the past: When the chips are down, invent a phony outrage to distract the public.

Follow the pattern:

As more stories of violence and dismissed warnings come in, more criticism of Romney comes out.

As our credit is downgraded again, more criticism of Romney comes out.

As the Federal Reserve announces plans to print $40 billion a month in a third attempt at “quantitative easing” to right the president’s broken economy, more criticism of Romney comes out.

No matter what happens, no matter how detached our president gets from the job he seeks to keep for four more years … no matter how many people die…we still haven’t seen enough of Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

That’s how sick the media has gotten.

Does the president defend our freedom? No. He asks YouTube to review the video to see if it violates the user agreement and can be taken down. Isn’t it amazing how the first instinct of liberals in any situation is to lionize extremists abroad and censor our speech at home? YouTube, showing a strong commitment to the Constitution than the man who swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” it, said it wouldn’t remove this horribly produced and acted Z-movie. Good for them standing up for the First Amendment. Bad for the media for trying to re-elect a man who turns his back on the very principle that protects its very existence.

The president has not acted like a president in this crisis, he’s acted more like a spoiled child told for the first time to eat his vegetables. Everything else he’s faced in office – abysmal economic data, the 2010 election, the unpopularity of his actions and policies – could be spun or somehow parsed to create whatever new data-metric reality he wanted because his media mouthpieces were only too happy to spread it.

But those events didn’t have smoke, fire, video and a body count the world can’t easily ignore.

The media’s spin will work on idiots, but the rape of reality can’t and won’t work on anyone with more IQ points than teeth. People, Americans, YOU, need to spend time every day between now and the election talking to anyone with at least one working ear who hasn’t yet decided how to vote and explain to them what is really happening. Donating money is great. Planning to vote yourself is key. But spreading the word to those open to hearing it and making sure they cast an educated vote is crucial.

Democrats don’t want voters to be educated or informed … thus the fight over voter ID laws. They want you to eat your gruel, take your medicine and re-elect the president because he knows more about what’s better for you than you do. With so many Americans now suckling the government teat, that easy message has a receptive and large audience. We have to be larger this November or our nation surely will be smaller in the future.

[Christians4LessGvt]

This grants nearly all the power in defining what is or is not a scandal to the Washington media elite. Congress can launch investigations, hold hearings, or otherwise make real news, but journalists have repeatedly ignored or dismissed the Obama scandals

[sirs]

Very likely, true.  Had they been objective in "08, especially with Obama's connections to Rev Wright, Bill Ayers, and Obama's record in voting a s a Senator, much of our current mess, both Foreign policy & Domestic spending would likely have been defused

It is amazing to watch interivew after interview of Romney, and tthe interviewer consistently comes off pushing Democrat talking points.

But when Obama ever gets in front of a reporter, do we ever hear any repeated questions related to our downgraded credit on his watch?, more debt than all other adminstrations combined?, GM stock nearly half of what tax payers originaly payed for it?, his famous quote that if things haven't turned around by the end of his 1st term, that he'd be a 1 term president?  If there has been such repetition, it sure has been buried