By Brent Bozell
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
Throughout the very long presidential election cycle, two
trends remained consistent. The media lauded Obama no matter how horrendous his
record, and they savaged Obama's Republican contenders as ridiculous
pretenders.
From the start of the Republican race in 2011, every
candidate who took the lead took an unfair beating. They even slimed Sarah
Palin in case she decided to run. Martin Bashir announced she was
"vacuous, crass, and, according to almost every biographer, vindictive,
too." Newsweek mocked Michele Bachmann on its cover, making her look pale,
confused and nutty, with the headline "The Queen of Rage." Politico
and other media outlets tried to pin sexual harassment claims on Herman Cain
without naming, or even knowing the accusers. The Washington Post killed trees
to report in earth-shaking depth how the Rick Perry family had leased a hunting
property where once the N-word was painted on a rock. Never mind that it was
the Rick Perry family that covered it with white paint. Chris Matthews smeared
Newt Gingrich by saying "He looks like a car bomber ... He looks like he
loves torturing." Matthews thought Newt was also polluting the civil
discourse. "Ever since he appeared on the national scene, politics has
been nastier, more feral, too often uglier."
Then late in the cycle came the dark horse, Rick
Santorum. He emerged and was slaughtered. Former New York Times editor Bill
Keller sneered, he "sounds like he's creeping up on a Christian version of
Sharia law."
The only one who seemed to miss his own special episode
of When Journalists Attack was Mitt Romney. But when he emerged as the nominee,
all bets were off. The Washington Post published a 5,400-word
"expose" documenting the shocking revelation that teenaged Romney
just may have pinned a boy down and cut his hair. In 1965.
To be sure, The Washington Post did publish a historical
piece on Obama's high school career, as well. Exactly a month after its
Romney-Running-With-Scissors article, it devoted 5,500 words in the Sports
section to an excerpt of David Maraniss's new biography with the headline
"President Obama's Love for Basketball Can be Traced Back to His High
School Team."
Despite the news media's infatuation with him, Obama
rarely reciprocated. He reduced to a trickle the media's access by minimizing
the number of White House press conferences. He hasn't called one since June.
Instead, he hopscotched from one flippantly unserious interview to another,
from Leno to Letterman, from "The View" to "Access Hollywood."
When Obama did consent to interviews with "news" shows, it was more
of the same, with embarrassing fawn-a-thons from Charlie Rose at CBS and Brian
Williams at NBC.
Even the September 11 attack on our consulate in
Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of our ambassador and three
others, and the subsequent and ongoing serial dishonesty of this administration
in its refusal to take a lick of blame for the scandalous lack of security, and
the refusal to help the men in need -- has been brushed under the rug to help
Obama. The only man hammered on that issue was Mitt Romney.
Anyone who hoped any of the liberal debate moderators
would bring accountability to Obama saw his hopes eviscerated. Anyone who hoped
Steve Kroft would press Obama in his September 12 "60 Minutes"
interview only saw Obama insisting "Governor Romney seems to have a
tendency to shoot first and aim later."
This passage from Peter Baker of The New York Times says
it all about Obama's press avoidance all the way to Election Day: "Nor has
Mr. Obama faced many tough questions lately, like those about the response to
the attack in Benghazi, Libya, since he generally does not take questions from
the reporters who trail him everywhere. Instead, he sticks to generally friendlier
broadcast interviews, sometimes giving seven minutes to a local television
station or calling in to drive-time radio disc jockeys with nicknames like Road
Kill."
How can you read that and not think journalism is road
kill?
No comments:
Post a Comment