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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend....

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To: Sully- who wrote (4504)2/3/2005 2:01:06 AM
From: Sully-   of 35834
 
Two incidents highlight the mainstream media's defects and biases.

by Hugh Hewitt
02/03/2005 12:00:00 AM
<snip>

THE SECOND SUBJECT for mulling is John Kerry's extraordinary interview with Tim Russert last Sunday. There's a lot to absorb here, including Kerry's assertion that he did indeed run guns and CIA men into Cambodia on secret missions--and to aid the Khmer Rouge no less!

What is really remarkable is not Kerry's whoppers--he couldn't have meant the Khmer Rouge, right?--or his almost certain not-to-be-fulfilled pledge to sign the form 180. It is the set of questions Tim Russert posed.

Russert is generally regarded as the toughest interview in television, and he did bleed Kerry a bit during the campaign; afterwards Kerry never again came close to Russert's set before November 2.

But if the questions posed by Russert on January 30, 2005--on Kerry's fantasy life in Cambodia, on the sequestered records, etc.--were legitimate and useful inquiries after the votes have been cast, why then did no one pose them to candidate Kerry when they might have made a difference in the election? The blogosphere and the center-right media were full of such demands from August 1 forward, but not a single reporter from mainstream media bothered to pose even one of the Russert questions prior to the vote.

Why was that?

If the country's most respected television journalist asks a series of questions after the election that no one asked during the contest, doesn't that tell us all we need to know about the mainstream media's coverage of Kerry? Doesn't that conclusively answer the question of whether the debate moderators really came to the stage prepared to ask the questions that mattered most?

But we knew that, didn't we? Tim Russert just provided the proof.

The pathetic effort to avoid posing tough questions to Kerry (and by contrast the Mapes-like fanaticism against Bush) highlights the almost lunatic imbalance of ideologies within mainstream media. Tim Russert may have taken aim at Kerry's Walter Mittyisms, but he hit his journalistic colleagues instead.


Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.

weeklystandard.com
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