Shortly after Obamacare was passed and signed by the President,
Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute noted a sudden plethora of
articles that had begun to appear in a wide variety of MSM outlets
about the probable ill-effects of “reform.” This prompted him to
ask, “Where were these reporters before the passage of the
health care bill?” The answer to this question is now pretty
obvious. They were colluding, via JournoList and other such forums
that we don’t know about, to make sure that no one screwed up and
told the truth before that morass of taxes and regulations became
the law of the land. To the nation’s cost, their self-censorship
succeeded.
Today, we face a similar but much more dangerous situation. The
“reporters” of the establishment news media are engaged in a
concerted campaign of misinformation to get Barack Obama
re-elected. This has been evident for some time, but the
breathtaking mendacity of this effort was writ large by Candy
Crowley during last Tuesday’s presidential debate. Everyone has by
now seen the video clip: the President made the preposterous claim
that he had identified the attack on our Benghazi consulate as an
act of terrorism as early as September 12. Then, when Romney called
him on this egregious whopper, Crowley repeated the lie.
This was no misbegotten attempt at instant “fact checking.” It
was a deliberately disingenuous attempt to pull the wool over the
eyes of the debate’s 65 million viewers. Crowley herself admitted
that she had reviewed the transcript of Obama’s September 12 Rose
Garden remarks in advance of the debate, and she is not dumb enough
to believe Obama’s characterization of his boilerplate comment
about “acts of terror” in general. This tag-team prevarication may
well backfire. Jeffrey Lord
suggests, in Thursday’s American Spectator, that it
may turn out to be the “tipping point that makes Mitt Romney the
45th President of the United States.”
That would certainly constitute a splendid example of poetic
justice. But what if Lord is wrong? What if Obama’s MSM pimps
succeed in getting him re-elected? As we saw with Obamacare, these
people wield a great deal of power and they are obviously willing
to abuse it. Moreover, despite the increasing distrust with which
the public regards the effusions of the Fourth Estate, nearly half
of the nation’s adults still believe what they see and hear in the
media. Gallup released a survey last month
showing that 40 percent of the electorate still has some
measure of confidence that the MSM reports the news “fairly,
accurately and fully.”
This percentage constitutes an all time low, and it also means
that 60 percent of the public has a healthy distrust of the media.
Another good sign is that the survey showed enormous skepticism
among the all important independents, only 31 percent of whom trust
the media. Nonetheless 40 percent amounts to tens of millions of
Americans, and its implications for last Tuesday’s face-off are
scary to contemplate. It suggests the possibility that 20 to 25
million of the debate’s viewers could well have accepted at face
value Crowley’s misleading statement about the President’s
immediate reaction to the Benghazi attack.
If the final debate contains similar misrepresentations of fact,
and it probably will, that could well dampen Romney’s momentum and
even cause him to lose the election. And this is where the media
become dangerous. Pat Caddell, a Democrat and former pollster for
Jimmy Carter, recently outlined
the peril: “The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect
the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from
organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and
decide that they will now become active participants … they have,
then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy …”
It is no coincidence that Caddell’s remarks, which were made on
September 27, were largely focused on the Benghazi attack. He was
clearly shocked and outraged by the failure of the media to do its
job as it relates to that particular “act of terror” and the
disgraceful conduct of Obama and his minions in its aftermath.
“We’ve had nine days of lies over what happened because they can’t
dare say it’s a terrorist attack, and the press won’t push this.
Yesterday there was not a single piece in The New York Times over
the question of Libya. Twenty American embassies, yesterday, were
under attack. None of that is on the national news.”
He went on to say that, during his days in active politics, the
media would have been all over any President who behaved as Obama
has behaved in reaction to Benghazi: “If a President of either
party — I don’t care whether it was Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton
or George Bush or Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush — had a
terrorist incident, and got on an airplane after saying something,
and flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, they would have been
crucified!” But this is not your father’s press corps. They do, in
fact, see themselves as “active participants” in political
campaigns. And they always support the Democrats.
The JournoList scandal and several subsequent incidents of
journalistic collusion have demonstrated that the media have
collectively decided to take up the mantle of the Democrat party as
well as its corrupt candidates. They have, as Caddell puts it,
“made themselves the enemy of the American people.” Thus, much more
is riding on the outcome of November’s election than who will live
in the White House. The voters will be deciding if we still live in
a democracy or a nation that has been “fundamentally transformed”
into a place where self-appointed elites decide our destinies
without regard to what we want or need.
