05/19/2009 (10:28 am)
…and dog bites man.
I can’t imagine anybody on the right expressing the least bit of surprise over the story that came up again over the weekend, confirming that the New York Times deliberately spiked a story detailing possibly illegal connections between the Obama campaign and ACORN. It seems that an informant to the Times testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee that the Obama campaign printed a list of maxed-out donors and sent it to ACORN so they could ply them for donations for voter registration drives; it seems that the Times reporter knew about the lists but was told by her editors not to publish the story, allegedly remarking that “it was a game-changer.” After 30 years of watching newspapers routinely ply leftist talking points as though they were news and acting in all ways as the propaganda wing of the Democratic party, hearing that the Times would pocket a story that might harm their beloved Obama’s candidacy is about as exciting as a bowl of corn flakes.
I can imagine Democrats expressing nothing but disdain that anybody could possibly question the veracity of the Corporate-America-owned New York Times (I even think some of them might use a sentence like that one, which contains an obvious contradiction). That’s because they’re so used to pretending that the news is either neutral or slanted to the right that they can no longer detect their own dissembling. That the news is completely friendly to the Democrats (apart from Fox) is no longer seriously debatable.
The story is actually oldish, reaching print in Philadelphia back at the end of March. Gateway Pundit reported on it back then, along with some other blogs. This weekend, Clark Hoyt, the Times’ Public Editor wrote in a weekend editorial that upon investigation, the story had actually been killed because none of their leads had panned out. John Hinderaker at Power Line takes this editorial apart, correctly noting that the facts in the editorial grant all the accusations and do nothing to refute them. In short, says Hinderaker, the Times is guilty of what Hoyt himself calls “about the most damning allegation that can be made against a news organization.” The American Spectator piles on with shrewd analysis of Times reporter Stephanie Strom’s series of articles about ACORN based on this same informant’s testimony (the testimony that suddenly “didn’t pan out” when it promised to embarrass the Obama campaign,) and Gateway Pundit follows up its own reporting on the matter.
The take from the 2008 presidential campaign has been that calling the national press corps “the propaganda wing of the Democratic National Committee” is not hyperbole, but operative fact. Welcome to the Democrats’ Brave New World.
1 Comment »
Comment by RM
Dog bites man, to be sure.
But as mundane as it may seem, I believe it is crucial to call the media to task each and every time they engage in this type of bias and duplicity.
If we get discouraged and fail in this task, we will lose the culture war entirely because they will truly have control over the narrative at that point. As you called it, the “screeching inversion” over time becomes the official narrative and eventually is accepted as conventional wisdom.
Didn’t George Orwell have some wise words in 1984 about what happens when one party controls how history is presented?
This is even more important because as alternative sources of media have “pushed back” against the constant left wing drumbeat, the left has become more open, and far more aggressive in forcing their “storyline” on the public. The majority of the public in turn gets its “news” and forms its viewpoints after absorbing agenda driven reporting and commentary from Katie Couric, The View, Oprah, Letterman, etc…