When Andrew Breitbart began the roll-out of the ACORN sting videos shot by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, he conceived of a campaign that wouldn’t be solely an attack on ACORN’s credibility, but that of the legacy media as well. He knew the MSM would circle the wagons when it came to an organization so closely intertwined with the president they worked so hard — or more accurately, avoided working so hard — to elect. As Breitbart wrote in early September:
Much of America has started to realize that not only was Mr. Obama not vetted before he became president, he and his fellow unvetted cohorts continue to be given a pass by the Fourth Estate.
Two more stories demonstrate how the Democrat-Media Complex, the natural alliance of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, is more concerned with trying to figure out how to destroy Glenn Beck – “he’s nuts!” – than to follow his methodical, accurate reporting. This dynamic – used against all potent critics and off-the-reservation journalists – shows that not only is the media ignoring all the negative things coming out about the Obama administration, it is acting like President Richard Nixon’s henchmen, making life difficult for its whistleblowers.
One of the stories is that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a massive radical organization, is poised to receive billions from the Obama “stimulus.”
ACORN’s voting division is currently under investigation in multiple states for fraud. And its housing division exists to fulfill an unclear mandate that has been accused of using funds to pay for political protests. If the alternative media digs further and finds out ACORN is guilty as charged, and as corrupt as its ample critics say it is, the onus is those who didn’t question when the Obama team decided to allocate billions to expand the group’s reach.
Brian Williams, the ball is in your court.
Another story not making the evening news is that of artist Patrick Courrielche, who has shown that the National Endowment of the Arts is seeking to use government funds to promote Obama administration initiatives. On Sunday’s “This Week,” George Will pierced the mainstream media veil.
“Recently there was a conference call arranged by the National Endowment for the Arts, with a representative of the White House, for potential grantees or actual grantees of the federal government, getting subsidies – the theme of it was how the arts community could advance the president’s agenda. Now I don’t know how many laws that breaks, but I am sure there are some.”
What are you waiting for, Katie Couric?
If the mainstream media continues down the path of covering up the sins of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, in particular, while it continues to exert its still powerful weapons to destroy those who would dare do their jobs for them, then eventually, perhaps in the near future, those “mobs” that have befuddled the Democratic Party at health care town halls and at tea parties will take their pitchforks to media row.
When the next big scandal hits – and it will, and it most certainly won’t come from traditional journalism – all eyes will be on “Pinch” Sulzberger to see if he does his job.
All eyes are on the media. We are judging them by the standard they taught us during Watergate: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”
ClimateGate is the latest test of the MSM’s ever-dwindling credibility in its twilight years, Rich Noyes writes at Newsbusters:
Two weeks ago, unnamed whistleblowers exposed years of e-mails from scientists working at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The CRU’s Web site describes it as “one of the world’s leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change,” but the e-mails paint the CRU as more of a political “war room” for radical environmentalists.
As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby observed Wednesday: “Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous. They reveal celebrated climate scientists apparently conspiring to corrupt the peer-review process, to suppress or finesse temperature data at odds with global-warming alarmism, to silence or discredit climate experts who criticize their work, and to hide or eliminate the raw data on which their own much-trumpeted claims have been based.”
Yet since the story broke, the MRC’s Business & Media Institute (BMI) discovered just one broadcast news reference to the “Climategate” e-mail scandal, on ABC’s This Week November 29; CBS and NBC have yet to inform their viewers.
Many are asking why the “news” media are so shamelessly covering up for these environmental radicals. The public ought not to be surprised. The media have been doing these radicals’ dirty work for decades, as the Media Research Center has documented:
Click over for the MRC’s examples. Noyes concludes:
When journalists become advocates, they inevitably fail to hold both sides accountable. If reporters had maintained an unbiased approach to global warming, they conceivably could have uncovered Climategate years ago. The question now is, will they admit the Left’s global warming scandal even exists?
Over to you, Brian and Katie.
Related: Speaking of a legacy media in its dotage, Danny Glover explores, “The Path To Media Failure.”
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