The American Spectator

The Rove story illustrates once again that the mainstream media are in the business not of reporting the news but of manufacturing it. Their reporting largely consists of reporting on news they’ve made — events that happen only because of their baiting and manipulation — with no mention of their involvement in the event’s creation. Reporters are like people who cause car crashes, then wander up to the scene and ask innocently, “What happened?”Â

Notice a minor example of this in the New York Times’ Rove story. The Times omnisciently reports, without mentioning its participation in the juvenile stalking, that Rove “nosed” his “Jaguar out of the garage” in the predawn gloom and “flashed his blinding high beams into the camera lenses and sped by.” The Times can’t bring itself to admit that it now operates at the level of the paparazzi. So it strains to bring dignity to its stalking by pretending like it is documenting for some high-minded reason how an important government offiicial spends his day during a crisis.