The Media Double Standard on Corruption
By Brad Scott Wilson
The mainstream news media continued its decline in 2008, both in credibility and profitability. Here is one reason why.
In late September, 2006, the Mark Foley scandal came to light, and Foley resigned almost immediately under threat of expulsion from Republican leadership. The media responded with a 5 week, in-depth frenzy into all things immoral and hypocritical about Foley and the Republicans. The "Culture of Corruption", a Democrat talking point, had many champions in the mainstream media, and they hammered home their point in countless articles and TV newscasts as the mid-term elections approached. Newsbusters reports a count of 152 stories among ABC, NBC, and CBS in 12 days.
The media moralized, called for investigations, and demanded that Speaker of the House Denny Hastert step down because he knew of the emails and instant messages, and didn't stop Foley from continuing. It became a non-stop, full-throated assault on Republicans. Add in the "macaca" comment by Virginia Senator George Allen and that ensuing media storm and the impression was that Republicans were nothing but child molesting, racist, uncaring hacks. And so it went. Just in time for the elections.
In mid October, 2008, the Democrat who took Mark Foley's seat in 2006, Tim Mahoney, admitted having "affairs" after it was disclosed that he paid one of his mistresses $121,000 in hush money and offered her a job paying $50,000 per year for two years. Audio surfaced of Mahoney firing his mistress over the phone in a decidedly unrefined manner. This scandal unleashed a one day, no-depth media pass on all things immoral and deceitful about Democrats. The new "Culture of Corruption"? For the media, not so much. No huge impact on the upcoming election, unlike 2006.
On MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski, Chuck Todd and Willie Geist said, laughing, "We are not going to get into the ugly details", and just like that they were done with Tim Mahoney. A search of the New York Times for the first 8 days after each story broke finds 67 stories about Foley, not including their blog pages, and just four for the Mahoney story. The Times' stories on Mahoney were buried on pages A12 and deeper. In other words, the New York Times can't find any similarities between the two stories and apparently doesn't have a problem with going full-bore after one guy and virtually ignoring the other. Newsbusters also managed to count all the television stories about Mahoney on ABC, NBC, and CBS the day after the story broke: zero.
Mahoney won the same seat that Foley held in the house. While running for election, Mahoney claimed to want "a world that is safer, more moral." So the same hypocrisy that all the mainstream media railed against for weeks in 2006 was available for this story too. Rahm Emanuel, at the time the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House and chair of the House Democratic Caucus knew something was going on in 2007.
"Upon hearing a rumor, Congressman Emanuel confronted Congressman Mahoney, told him he was in public life and had a responsibility to act accordingly and appropriately, and urged him to do so," a spokeswoman said. "They had no further conversations on this topic."
Nancy Pelosi said "I just learned today..." To my knowledge, no one even asked Steny Hoyer if he knew about what was going on. Apparently, no one in the media had any doubts that these people were telling the truth. If Denny Hastert was placed on the hook for not keeping the flock in line, shouldn't the same standard apply to Emanuel or Pelosi? Shouldn't Emanuel have informed Pelosi? Both Pelosi and Emanuel called for an ethics investigation, which will no doubt be thorough and candid. But of course the investigation and any potentially damaging effects were put off until after the election. After all, no one in the media was pressing them for answers or explanations.
Then there is the 20 minutes of tape in which Mahoney, in a very callous fashion, fired his mistress over the phone. Did you hear it on the evening news? NBC, ABC, and CBS didn't play even a clip, much less let their commentators have a go at the deeper meaning of it, how it would effect the election, what it might mean to the voters now that the Democrats were exposed as having their own Culture of Corruption. No, it's on the internet, but the MSM had almost no interest whatsoever. Odd, isn't it?
The media covered Democratic problems differently than Republican ones. There wasn't the same interest or effort to link the ethical problems of William Jefferson, Charlie Rangel, Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, John Edwards, Diane Feinstein, and Harry Reid to the Democratic Party as a whole, to make the same allegations against the Democrats as they did the Republicans.
The media went to great lengths in 2006 to tie Foley to the larger corruption of the Republican Party. Fair enough. They had, and have, as they say, "issues". The point is that they did not do the same thing in the Mahoney case, and it wasn't even remotely close. And this is certainly one reason why the mainstream media's reputation is so poor.
The issue here is not that the media took Mark Foley and the Republicans to the woodshed. It's that they left Tim Mahoney and the Democrats behind.
Brad Scott Wilson founded AmericanPlatform.org to give everyday conservatives a place to converse, contribute and be heard.
americanthinker.com
Time for the GOP to Focus on Democrat Corruption
By AWR Hawkins
The Democratic Party holds to three major rules concerning politics in this country:
1. Democrats make "mistakes," Republicans commit crimes.
2. Republicans are not allowed to harp on Democrat "mistakes" but Democrats are free to confront Republicans over the slightest "moral discrepancy" whenever and wherever they choose.
3. If Republicans do somehow muster the courage to point out a Democrat "mistake," as they did with the great perjurist-in-chief Bill Clinton, they are to be charged with using "the politics of personal destruction."
But now, with internet sites and cable channels alike carrying the news of Friday's indictment of Baltimore's Democrat Mayor Sheila Dixon for perjury and the impeachment of Illinois Democrat Governor Ron Blagovich after he tried to sell a Senate seat to the highest bidder, can't we finally gather the courage to ignore the Democrats politically correct guide to political confrontation and throw down the gauntlet?
It's clear from here that the Democrats represent the politics of personal corruption.
Let's be honest, the Dixon and Blagovich cases are only the latest examples of Democrat corruption. Within the last year and a half alone we've seen Detroit's Democrat Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick indicted for perjury and learned that former Democrat Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate John Edward's was meeting a mistress instead of sitting at home with his cancer-stricken wife, whom he repeatedly fawned over on the campaign trail. And prior to these things, in 2005, there was the post-Katrina discovery of large amounts of untraceable cash in the refrigerator one of Louisiana's Democrat Congressmen, William Jefferson.
Of course there are many more examples of Democrat corruption; I've just listed the ones that were widely reported.
If we wanted to broaden our list of Democrat lies and examples of corruption or outright crimes, we could include New York Democrat Mayor Elliot Spitzer's fling with a prostitute, Jesse Jackson's mistress and subsequent lovechild, New Jersey Governor McGreevy's homosexual affair, and the news that the Senate Subcommittee on Military Construction, of which Senator Diane Feinstein was a member, had awarded a "number of defense contracts...to Perini Corp. and URS Corp, both of which [Feinstein's] husband Richard Blum has ownership in." (Feinstein resigned from the subcommittee when news of this surfaced.)
Sure we should also include Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment, and mention the fact that the only two presidents in American history to be impeached were Democrats (Andrew Johnson being the first). We could even go back to Senator Ted Kennedy's famous Oldsmobile in the Chappaquiddick trick that cost Mary Jo Kopechne her life. (If a Republican had done that it would have been called "manslaughter.")
Notice, I haven't touched on Barrack Obama ties to Pastor Jeremiah Wright or Williams Ayers -- the former damns America instead of blessing her, while the latter wishes he'd committed more terrorism toward the U.S. than he did back in the day.
Yet Republicans remain frozen in place. Instead of campaigning or legislating to win by shaming the Democrats we ignore the horror of their corruption, we run emasculated McCain-like campaigns and half-heartedly pursue a conservative agenda out of fear that we'll be accused of the politics of personal destruction.
Some Republicans are so feeble that they tremble with fear like Senator Trent Lott did when faced with duty of overseeing the sentencing phase that followed Clinton's impeachment. You remember Lott don't you? He was the Senate leader in the late 1990s who responded to this duty by saying, "Oh no, you're not going to put this off on me."
Lott's type of cowardice is presently at epidemic levels in the Republican Party and there is no reason for it. The very existence of Democrats provides an opportunity for Republican success because Democrats are inextricably linked to corruption, and therefore cannot survive a focused, partisan assault on their motives and criminal history.
To be fair, I am not attempting to assert that Republicans have avoided corruption altogether throughout this nation's history; but I am saying that Republican corruption, when it had taken place, has both been the exception rather than the rule and has been dealt with swiftly (if not excessively) from within the party. On the other hand Democrats, like Congressman Charlie Rangel, whom we recently learned did not bother paying taxes on some of his property holdings, are so comfortable with their corruption that they laugh at investigations while chalking up delinquent taxes to a simple oversight on their part.
The truth is that the Democrats should live life on their heels. They should be scared of meeting Republicans in a public forum for fear of what lie, crime, or other corrupt practice the Republicans may point out next.
Will we waste this opportunity by continuing to operate politically from a position of self-imposed weakness (and subsequent defeat) or will we call things like we see them and send the Democrats scurrying for the tall grass?
I say we send them scurrying. And we can succeed in this by simply pointing out the politics of personal corruption in the Party of Corruption.
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