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Obama’s Scandals and the Chirping Crickets of the Liberal Media

Obama’s Scandals and the Chirping Crickets of the Liberal Media

At the time of Watergate, who ever stopped to wonder what would have happened had Nixon been a Democrat?

Why has the mainstream media been so silent about the scandals in which the Obama administration has become embroiled?

From Roger L. Simon at Pajamas Media:

Obama is beside the point. They [the liberal media] don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it.

So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that?

No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.

I agree that the MSM is deeply disappointed in Obama, and deeply reluctant to say so. But I doubt they’re as deeply disappointed as all that, not deeply enough to question their own role in the whole thing, or their belief system. That takes a great deal of courage and integrity, particularly for people with entrenched and vested interests—such as the Times editors and their ilk, as Simon points out—who would therefore be extremely reluctant to do it.

So no, my hunch is that they’re not especially ashamed of themselves. And I’m pretty sure there’s very little real soul searching going on, except perhaps to try to figure out how better to engineer things for Hillary or Elizabeth Warren or whoever emerges as the next liberal nominee.

I’m afraid what the Times is doing is old-fashioned CYA. They can’t think of a way to spin Obama’s abysmal failures any more (the MSM does have certain standards, although those standards are pretty low), so they are silent.

They’re also very accustomed to setting the news agenda, and think they can get away with ignoring news they don’t like. That NY Times slogan “All the news that’s fit to print” takes on new meaning, doesn’t it? Up till now I’d always assumed they were conveying the idea that they cover the news thoroughly (they’d like us to think they cover it objectively, too, but that’s an absurdity). But did you ever wonder what sort of news isn’t “fit to print”? Why, it’s news that would hurt liberals and help conservatives, that’s what news. And it doesn’t matter if that news constitutes the biggest scandal since Watergate—potentially even bigger than Watergate.

At the time of Watergate, who ever stopped to wonder what would have happened had Nixon been a Democrat and done exactly the same thing? Well, now we don’t have to wonder.

Please do yourself a favor and take a look at this Onion article for some relevant comic relief:

More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime…

“What exactly is the news hook here?” asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a ‘day in the life’ of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama’s unusual upbringing in Hawaii helped to shape the way he would one day viciously butcher two helpless citizens in their own home?”

“Or maybe the story is just that murder is cool now,” Kaplan continued. “I don’t know. There are a million different angles on this one.”

There’s a saying in politics that the only way a shoo-in candidate could lose an election is by being caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy. But all bets are off with Obama.

[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]

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Comments

But I doubt they’re as deeply disappointed as all that, not deeply enough to question their own role in the whole thing, or their belief system.

And I’m pretty sure there’s very little real soul searching going on, except perhaps to try to figure out how better to engineer things for Hillary or Elizabeth Warren or whoever emerges as the next liberal nominee.

Exactly. The problem isn’t the product, it’s the marketing.

Having worked for a newspaper for a few years, I offer a slightly different theory: Reporting on Bush scandals – even trumped up BS ones – was FUN. It spoke truth to power and hit the evil Republicans hard. It was a great public service and made everyone feel important.

Reporting on Obama’s scandals is just work. It’s soooo disappointing and reflects badly on the fine and good people of the democrat party, on government works and even Obama’s administration. It may be necessary but it’s just so hurtful.

Better to watch TV and think about it some more.

Whether or not the media admit that it is their responsibility, it doesn’t free them from that responsibility. They freely chose to not vet that man and now they can go down with that man.

I don’t think it has as much to do with ‘saving face’ as it does with fear of appearing racist. They fear the blacklash. The same media is not covering black on white crime – the so-called ‘knockout game’ and on rare occasion when they do cover it, the report is scrubbed of any hint of race or suggestion it’s a hate crime. Just ‘kids blowing off some steam’. In this regard, the media is a reflection of America at large – fear the angry black man.

I’m thinking even “being found with a live boy or a dead girl” as Edwin Edwards was quoted as saying wouldn’t have the MSM doing anything but trying to support either NAMBL or necrophilia as excuses for Obama in such a situation.

Heck, they haven’t even queried Harry Reid about his alleged pederasty.

they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable

I doubt that anything like that would occur to any of them. As good progressives, they need no justification for their beliefs, no matter how childish or destructive. Galbraith called such people the “militantly unreflective”. Disillusion with the New Messiah just means that they become disappointed, but they’ll remain militantly unreflective.

Obama-worship and metastasized progressivism are distinct phenomena.

The press may be disappointed in Obama, but that doesn’t imply that any journos will re-examine any of their basic assumptions. To them, he may have turned out to be a dead end; but the job of fighting what leftoids imagine is the “good fight” goes on.

No matter what happens to Obama, don’t expect any change in the press. The program of one-sided reporting, fabricated news, innuendo, subversion, coverup, and propaganda will continue.

Coupla thangs…

1. Obama has let the Collective down in some essential ways. Even the most dedicated Collectivist has to acknowledge the scandals on some level. Hence, they are doing some navel-gazing over the fall of their lil’ god-child.

2. BIG GOVERNMENT never fails to a Collectivist. The people we have in charge fail, we didn’t spend enough, it lacked the authority (read “strip people of their rights”) to get the job done, etc. But they just don’t understand that BIG GOVERNMENT NEVER works. It doesn’t work for a bushel basket of reasons…which is to say it CAN’T work and it never will work to do as hoped.

3. Because (2) is true, only rarely will individuals come to the realization that their Collective is a delusion built on constant lies. Which is to say, the Collective cannot change its fundamental character and goals. It is a vacant hope to think it can.

4. Daily embrace of the enormous number of lies…big and small…a Collectivist my tell him or herself causes a complete distortion of rational thought. This, in turn, leads to an ersatz “rational-y” mode of thinking, well demonstrated by the NYT and the LAT, and aped by lesser rags. Think of your favorite examples, but here is a real zinger…

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/the-weeks-climate-embarrassment.php

The person who could write that nonsense in “Slate” will literally believe anything. AND they will expect you to find that tripe at LEAST plausible.

Which is to say, the Collectivist Mushroom Media is made up of people so profoundly deluded that they are functionally not sane. They do not, and really cannot, deal with reality.

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | June 28, 2014 at 12:12 pm

Generally speaking, I no longer view the media as an adversary of the Ruling Class. I think it is part of it. Young people graduate from prestigious colleges and universities to become journalists not to objectively report the news, but to help the Ruling Class transform the U.S. from an individualistic society into a collectivist European-style social democracy. I think it is hard for them to report on Obama’s incompetence and scandals because they are advocates, not adversaries. To them, Obama means well. He has good intentions. They WANT him to succeed. Reporting his failures would likely set the whole transformation project back.

Another thing to consider is what Sharyl Attkisson has been talking about in her recent interviews. It is quite apparent that the government has more influence over the news than we appreciate. Don’t forget that ABC, CBS, and NBC all operate on licenses issued by the federal government. Attkisson claims the pushback from government to some of the stories she worked on would often be so severe that it would get escalated to the highest levels of the network. Erik Wemple at WaPo has some interesting statistics about how much less air time her stories have received in the Obama era than before. It’s quite possible she’s received less air time for legitimate business reasons, and I certainly do not think for one second that the public would tolerate the government pulling a network’s license because the network criticized the government or the President. But that does not mean that high ranking government officials do not abuse their power and hold that license over the network’s head as a way to influence how a story is told or to shut a story down completely.

Look, we now know that three execrable Democrat Senators – Whitehouse, Durbin and especially Levin – wrote multiple letters to the IRS urging it to break the law and target conservative groups. If they can abuse their power and intimidate a government agency to violate the law, then why won’t they abuse their power to influence how news organizations with licenses granted to them by the government report the news? That prospect would have seemed like a crazy conspiracy theory in an earlier era. Now, not so much.

NYT abandoned even the pretense of integrity when they brought in the ne’er-do-well scion of the owning family, Pinch Sulzberger.

At one time before that, it was an indispensable source of news. Now you can’t even depend on the bestseller lists to be accurate.

NBC may have paid Chelsea Clinton more than their Washington Bureau Chief, but it isn’t as if we didn’t know what was going on from the time they rigged trucks to explode to demonstrate their lack of safety (it was true, too – trucks with bombs attached are not very safe).

ABC infiltrated Food Lion and faked unsafe practices. CBS had the “fake but accurate” documents passed on by a shadowy woman at a State Fair.

PBS fired Juan Williams because his toe stepped over the liberal line once.

WaPo puts Dana Milbank on the front page sometimes instead of the comic pages.

That anyone at all depends on these sources for news is an indictment of our public education system. And it makes the Millennials look not so bad for getting their news from The Daily Show.

Uncle Samuel | June 28, 2014 at 2:36 pm

Not scandals – CRIMES.

Obama and his cadre of crooks have been committing CRIMES non-stop since taking office.

Scandal is a petty gossip matter, dealing with crime is a matter of law and order.

Obama should be jailed along with most of the occupants of the legislatures.