The Man Who Never Was [Corrected]
By Matthew Weaver on September 24, 2008 at 11:16 AM in Barack Obama, David Axelrod, John McCain, Media Bias
Tony Blankley writes a blistering critique today of the media’s failure to investigate and report the news seriously or fairly. He aptly labels Barack Obama The Man Who Never Was, claiming the real Obama is nothing like the caricature painted by the media. A media is accuses of being “straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign….[where] 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.”
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”:
The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don’t see Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile “come on” when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels’ disciples, not Cronkite’s.
What about Obama’s 20 year relationship with terrorist William Ayers?
But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama’s life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama’s two years at New York’s Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious?
And Obama’s rise in Chicago politics? Blankley notes the lack of media attention that leaves unanswered questions:
How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great — and unflattering — details on Obama’s Chicago years presented in David Freddoso’s new book on Obama, the mainstream media continue to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, The Economist, to give Freddoso’s book a review with fair comment.
“The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis,” Blankly quotes from Stuart Taylor. Blankley observes:
The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.
Blankley concludes that “One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street’s leaders currently are for their failings.”
I personally have my doubts that the Wall Street will be held accountable for its failings any more than the media will be for its biases, lies, and omissions about Barack Obama. Worse, while Wall Street costs are in dollars, should Obama win the cost will instead be measured in the lives of our fellow citizens and future of our country.
Correction: This post was updated to correct the name from Tom to Tony Blankley. Thanks to breeze for catching the error!
by Ronald Scott
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