Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Whine

Tony Blankley at Real Clear Politics wastes eight-hundred words whining about the media's unfair treatment of Obama:

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.

While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Thus, the public image of Obama is of a "man who never was."

Blankley is incensed that the media won't repeatedly reply minor word stumbles by Obama (unlike their highly professional, insightful and thoughtful coverage of Dean's yell in 2004 that essentially sank his campaign) or spend untold hours digging into Obama's non-association with Ayers, or impugning his integrity with non-stories about his insignificant ties to other Chicago politicians, etc., etc. Never mind that the media already spent much of the primary probing Obama's secret Muslim past, or endlessly looping statements made by Rev. Wright (coverage that Blankley conveniently leaves out...the primaries were indeed a long time ago for some of us, apparently.) Blankley also conveniently leaves out the fact that McCain has riled the press repeatedly by refusing to hold press conferences, selecting as his VP someone who he doesn't trust to answer questions except in the most controlled of settings, and questioning the journalistic integrity of reporters who dare to call out the McCain campaign on some of their more obvious lies, or the fact that the McCain campaign took minor complaints to a new level as part of a deliberate effort to go to war with "liberal" press and rile up their base in doing so. In other words, Blankley operates with a special blend of amnesia and hackery that permits him to make such a ridiculous claim, but the only person he's fooling is himself.

UPDATE: To cleanse your palate, here is an interview with Douglas Kmiec, noted conservative, former legal counsel to Regan and George H.W. Bush and former dean of Catholic University's Columbus School of Law, who has recently written a book explaining his support of Barack Obama for President. Kmiec is thoughtful, insightful and reasonable, which makes him pretty much the exact opposite of hacks like Blankley.

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