l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Dan Gainor
November 11, 2011
Tune in the evening news and you’d think America is a scandal-plagued
nation. Scandals to the right of us, scandals to the left of us. There’s
the media assault on GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, the deadly Fast
and Furious federal gun-running case, the Solyndra solar loan fiasco or the
collapse of MF Global, led by former Democratic N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine.
But the real scandal isn’t any one of those. It’s how journalists pick and
choose which controversies to play up and which to play down. They are so
inconsistent, you’d think they studied ethics at Penn State under Joe
Paterno.
Heck, maybe he studied under them.
Take the allegations against Cain. We are watching ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos attack Herman Cain on how he deals with women. This is the
same George Stephanopoulos who worked for Bill Clinton and did his best to
undermine attacks against him. Remember, Clinton was charged with a variety
of women-unfriendly incidents including rape. Yes, rape. Not that the
networks made a big deal of it at the time.
Here’s Stephanopoulos, on page 267 of his autobiography “All Too Human,”
"Most important, I wanted to keep reports of Paula [Jones'] press conference
off television ... It wasn't a hard sell.” His book goes on to say how he
tried to discredit her. Yes, this openly Democratic operative is a “newsman
” now.
Don’t believe it for a second. The different between “journalist” and
Democratic Party operative is often nonexistent.
It shows in everything they do. We aren’t even two weeks into CainFest 2011
and the broadcast networks have done 117 stories on him. One-hundred and
seventeen? That’s more than a small war would get. Actually, it’s 58 times
more than a small war has gotten. Obama ordered troops into Uganda in
October, before the Cain allegations came out. CBS and NBC have each
mentioned it once since then. ABC hasn’t mentioned it at all.
But the networks don’t care about American soldiers at risk. They are more
concerned that Obama’s presidency is at risk.
That’s the only explanation for how they’ve covered, or not covered, the
Fast and Furious scandal. You’ve had to look hard to find consistent
coverage of this corrupt government program that cost the life of at least
one law enforcement officer. Allegedly the goal was to track U.S. guns to
drug cartels and arrest gun runners.
But the program was poorly run and it cost the life of Border Patrol Agent
Brian Terry. A good leader would take responsibility for that. A moral
leader would have called the family to talk to them or meet with them in
person. Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t do either. All he did do was
lie to Congress about it.
According to Holder, the program was furiously “flawed in its concept and
flawed in its execution.” That skips any blame for when he told Congress he
had heard of the program only weeks before. Now we know that’s just not
true. In any other city than Washington, D.C., what Holder did was a
boldfaced lie.
Not that you’d know it from most network news. While CBS’s Sharyl
Attkisson has shown her top-flight skills as a journalist, and been abused
by the Obama administration for it, her competing networks have abandoned
their responsibility to their viewers. Both NBC and ABC skipped the House
Republican roasting Holder received on Capitol Hill.
It’s been much the same in the Solyndra scandal. There only ABC has shown
any semblance of journalistic skill covering Obama’s failed green program.
It’s a $500-million scandal involving an Obama fundraiser, a solar panel
company that had a dot.com era idea on how to make a profit (none) and it’s
gotten nowhere near the media coverage a Republican scandal might have
gotten. (Just ask Herman Cain.)
A recent Media Research Center analysis found “just 15 stories mentioning
the Solyndra scandal since its August 31 bankruptcy filing.” For those who
find math difficult – like many journalists – that’s about one eighth of
the stories the Cain controversy has gotten.
But hey, Solyndra wasn’t run by a former governor considered as a possible
Treasury Secretary and hailed by news outlets as an economic expert. That
would be a real scandal. Or not, if he had the infamous “D” after his name.
The former governor is Jon Corzine, who has the reverse Midas touch. He’s
run Goldman Sachs, New Jersey and, most recently, MF Global, which just
collapsed amidst a $2-billion bankruptcy. MF Global fell apart in what CNBC'
s Andrew Ross Sorkin called a “mini Ponzi scheme.”
But not one story on ABC, CBS or NBC has mentioned that Corzine is a
Democrat, was considered an Obama adviser and possible pick for a top spot
in his administration.
Every time there’s a controversial story, media types are making these
choices. They love the Occupy Wall Street crowd, so they play up the good
from those protests, despite rapes, vandalism, arson, assaults on police and
more. But they hate the Tea Parties, so everything they do is somehow
nefarious.
It’s time the media covered their own scandals. They have plenty. | o***s
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