“Barbara Walters, Shameless Hypocrite: Hits Kennedy Mistress for Greed, Tells Her She Should Have Stayed Quiet,” Tim Graham writes at Newsbusters:
Almost four years ago, ABC’s Barbara Walters came out with her memoir Audition, using as its selling point a tale of her tawdry 1970s affair with married black Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.). Seldom has a TV personality been a more shameless public hypocrite than Walters was on Friday with former Kennedy mistress Mimi Alford during an interview on “The View.”
Walters battered Alford four times with the notion she was greedy, with four different outbursts like “She’ll make a lot of money!” (That one came in the introduction.) Walters asked Alford why she would hurt Caroline Kennedy and her family, and then assaulted her with the reverse idea, that she could have “saved” Monica Lewinsky from ridicule if she’d talked earlier. But mostly, she insisted the book “did not have to be written” and “You could have let it go!” [Video and MP3 at Newsbusters.]
It’s always a bit amazing for a journalist, who’s supposed to want to reveal secrets, to tell people they should shut up and not tell their story. It’s more amazing to tell someone not to write a tell-all memoir after you’ve already done so, with a ka-ching. Walters was probably signaling to Alford: “I’m famous, people want to know about my fascinating life. You’re a nobody, just trying to exploit a famous man’s aura for a few bucks.”
As an elite Northeast Corridor liberal journalist, Walters is required to take one for the team on a whole host of issues — from John Edwards (keep rockin’!) to the ACORN scandal to ClimateGate, which the New York Times famously tried to bury in 2009 with this sorry defense, the mirror image of their making their bones in the WaterGate era with the publication of the Pentagon Papers:
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
To which Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard responded at the time, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published.”
But for Walters and many “journalists” on the left, silence at the appropriate time, in the cause of either advancing the Official Narrative or keeping the old legends preserved intact is an even greater reward.
Or course, as my PJM colleague Andrew Klavan has noted, “just shut up” has long been the motto of the left:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member