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Until Monday, this was threatening to become the first Presidential campaign in modern times in which the Democratic Presidential candidate was granted exclusively favorable coverage, by what is called the Mainstream Media, and the Republican drew only critical attention.
Newspaper coverage routinely has become so tilted that the extraordinary goes unremarked.
Most recently, The New York Times assigned its Character Assassination Editor, Mark Leibovich, who has made a nice living during the Bush Years savaging the newspaper’s Republican Bullseye of the Week, to assault the character and motives of Sen. Joe Lieberman. For a front-page story that ran in Monday’s edition, he was to criticize the Democrat turned Independent, for having the chutzpah to align himself with the hated John McCain instead of with He Who Is Without Sin.
The newspaper indicated it has no plans to attack Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel for doing the reverse, abandoning his party’s Mr. McCain while touting the other side’s cult of personality candidate, known to true believers as He Who Is Without Sin.
The Times’s message was that Mr. Hagel displayed wisdom by vacating the Republicans while Mr. Lieberman committed a horrific, darned near immoral, gaffe by betraying Democrats who were loyal to him up to an election or two ago.
Maybe This Will Hurt McCain
Before firing its latest publisher, the Los Angeles Times said dramatically a closer examination of Mr. McCain’s divorce, 28 years ago, was worthy of another visit. Amazingly, it ran a head-scratching story by 2 second-tier reporters at the top of page A-1. Larded with dark-sounding imagery, sparse with direct quotes and on research, the Times lamely concluded nothing actually was amiss.
Maybe This Will Hurt McCain
During the spring, The New York Times sniffed around and found that a rumor held that the married Mr. McCain was seen in public with a blonde associate more frequently than any decent-minded married man should be seen with a woman not his wife during the ’00 campaign. The lengthy top of page A-1 story asserted that a number of people, almost all of them anonymous to protect their sense of exaggeration, thought Mr. McCain had been seen, in public, too often with the woman. There must have been something going on, the Times kept saying. At the bottom of the story, head hanging, The New York Times also concluded, sadly, that well, we guess, reluctantly, Mr. McCain did not do anything wrong.
But, oh, boy, said the Times, for awhile it sure looked as if he had, didn’t it?
Is She Robin or Batman?
As recently as Tuesday morning, in the Los Angeles Times, two Obama cheerleaders, girl reporters Robin Abcarian and Nicole Gaouette, roasted Mr. McCain by including a few opinions of their own in a news story.
The giggling girls, pulling hard for Mr. McCain to be walloped by He Who Is Without Sin, were dispatched to San Diego. They were assigned to cover Mr McCain’s address before the race-baiters who comprise the extremist Hispanic organization National Council of La Raza, which means The Race.
In recent years, The Race has become a favorite pull-toy for the leading activist group on the far left, MoveOn.org funded by the most notorious figure on the far left, George Soros.
The smarmy Ms. Abcarian is possibly the most overt cheerleader on staff for He Who Is Without Sin among the surviving girl reporters at the rapidly shrinking Times.
She lathered Mr. McCain and his reputation throughout the story with a tactic all respected reporters shun. She inserted her opinions — as unabashed correctives —in each instant where she judged Mr. McCain had erred.
A Brassy but Unclassy Lassie
By mid-story, Ms. Abcarian violated one of journalism’s most sacred rules, substituting her belief for facts.
In the 12th paragraph, she wrote of Mr. McCain that “he accused Obama of trying to kill a 2007 (immigration) measure, which also failed. ‘Sen. Obama went out at the request of labor unions and voted for amendments that would have killed the bill,’ McCain said, ‘and that’s the facts, sir.’”
Ms. Abcarian promptly disputed this contention. Instead of researching the point to show Mr. McCain as errant, she tossed off this airy line, “That’s not how the facts are universally interpreted.”
This remains my frustration with the Times, slyly and regularly substituting opinion for verifiable information.
Can’t Take a Joke, Eh?
What makes these reflections germane this week is that the bully got bullied when the left-wing outsmarted itself by half with the fairly outrageous cover of the Obamas dressed up as terrorists on this week’s cover of The New Yorker magazine. The left-wing editor of the left-wing magazine out-cuted fellow lefties who do not understand subtle gestures.
By yesterday, the hugely popular left-wing blog, the Huffington Post, was carrying 5 essays critical of the New Yorker editor whose trickery backfired into his humbled face.
It is said by sensible people that God wasted a perfectly good sense of humor if he ever vested one set in a liberal body. Liberals with a sense of humor are as rare as the dying penguins the global warmies complain about. The New Yorker editor was supposed to be satirizing the right-wing’s mythical accusations against The Couple Without Sin. The editor forgot his handicapped progressive peers are moral quadriplegics — no sense of humor, no sense of irony, no sense of the satirical and no ability to see the world in context.
