Such an outcome would be worse than a scandal, it would be downright dangerous.
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 Journo List 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."
No comments:
Post a Comment