"The problem that the so-called liberal media have is that they're liberal."
Hugh Hewitt.com
Ted Kennedy uses the Senate floor to slander America and its military --"Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management."-- and how does the elite media react?
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Stories on the prisoner abuse scandal in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal make no mention of Kennedy's repulsive excess.<font size=3> The Washington Post alone among the bigs uses the last paragraph in its story to note that Kennedy took to the floor to blast the military and the administration, but does not use this quote, preferring to quote Kennedy's statement that President Bush had presided over "America's steepest and deepest fall from grace in the history of our country," a "colossal failure of leadership."
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Last week the editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, actually lectured America on pseudo-journalism and its dangers, and actually went out of his way to name FoxNews<font size=3> (the transcript hasn't been published so we are unsure which other news organizations don't meet Carroll's test for real journalism --the one he applies to Robert Scheer.) It is clear, however, that the failure to note or report as massive a charge as Ted Kennedy's is evidence of a deep disease of partisanship within elite media, one that is even now driving most of Iraq war coverage in the direction of undermining U.S. support for the war there and across the globe.
Why should Kennedy's outrage be on the front page of every newspaper in America?
First, he is a surrogate for John Kerry, his chief sponsor in the quest for the nomination and his warm-up act at all key rallies. Ted Kennedy has the ear of John Kerry, and the woman running Kerry's campaign, Mary Beth Cahill, was the Kennedy chief-of-staff who left Kennedy's office to take over Kerry's campaign. If Kennedy didn't clear the statement outright with Kerry-Cahill, he can be understood to speak for the Kerry campaign in matters large and small.
Second, Ted Kennedy is a figure of significance on the level with former Presidents Carter, Bush and Clinton. Very few Americans command the world's attention as does Teddy.
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Finally, the remarks outrage Americans --when they are allowed to read or hear them.<font size=3> I know because I played them yesterday afternoon and the outpouring of anger was huge and sustained. The remarks move people to political action --I suggested they respond with donations to www.georgewbush.com, www.johnthune.com, or www.nrsc.org. Scores did, and are still doing so. Not since the Democratic effort to suppress the military absentee ballots in Florida in 2000 has an action by a major Democratic figure so energized center-right political opinion.
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This last quality explains why the remark is not featured<font size=3>
--editors in left-leaning papers like John Carroll's Lost
Angeles Times either do not understand how such a remark
assaults the sensibility of the average America because
Ted Kennedy's conclusions are the newsroom's conclusions,
or because he or she does understand the significance of
the remarks and the damage they will do to the Kerry
campaign and the Democratic Party, the Kennedy slander is
omitted from the reports from Washington.
That the briefest mention of Kennedy's remarks made it into the Washington Post tells us they were noted and noted in time for today's papers. But their absence from all but the Post, and their editing in the Post tells us much more about the "journalism" John Carroll values --the agenda journalism of the left come to direct public opinion via the "news judgment" of elites determined to underscore the news hostile to Bush and bury or quickly minimize the stories harmful to the Kerry campaign. (What happened to those swift boat commanders.)
I don't think it will work. Kennedy's quote will be rebroadcast across hundreds of programs today on the radio and are already being sliced and diced on the internet, as with this blogger. Kerry cannot outrun the senior senator from his state who is responsible for his running. But the treatment of a major, major news story by elite media tells us all we need to know about John Carroll's theory of "pseudo-journalism." Can you say "projection?"
The danger to the war effort is not just in the propaganda that Teddy and others like Carl Levin provide the other side, but in the "outrage fatigue" they inspire in those fully committed to supporting the war and the elected and appointed officials leading it, and the military fighting it. The vast public can grow weary, not of the battles abroad, but of those at home. It is unpleasant stuff, to have to listen to Kennedy, and Leahy, and Theresa Heinz and the whole gang constantly assaulting us with absurd logic and bald lies, that we know to be lies but about which the dope of the day with the microphone says nothing and asks nothing. There is no one dogging Kennedy asking, "Senator, how many people did the U.S. military execute, and how does that compare with Saddam's total for the last year of his reign?" Watching the left escape accountability daily, and for the most outrageous statements like Kennedy's beery slander of the great and good American military --emphasis on good-- and the audience fears it has seen this movie before. Those of us born before 1960 get a sick feeling --it cannot be happening again, can it? Not after 9/11? The last time it was harder to see the consequences of retreat --the boat people, the Cambodian holocaust-- but not this time. This time retreat means death on these shores and in large, possibly overwhelming numbers. They came close to destroying the government less than three years ago, and Kennedy's outrage is unreported?
So I focus on the outrage I heard yesterday, not on the cover-up of Teddy's rantings in this morning's papers. The voters "get it." They know. The polls show a tight race, but that's a tribute to the fact that polling cannot anticipate the moment in the fall when the public looks up, looks at Kerry-Kennedy, and says, "Are you kidding? I want my kids to live, and I want this country to survive as it is, not as it would be if the jihadists grew in power and numbers. I don't like the war, but I understand its necessity. And the president and Rumsfeld and the whole bunch of them are serious, determined types who will get it done."
Saddam's torture chambers have not reopened, newspapers have. We're winning. "Sometimes history is written in hot, little dusty places on the Earth," Marine Corps Major General James N. Mattis said yesterday after himself driving with his Marines into the center of Fallujah. "That's what we did today, and it's good history."
Mattis or Kennedy. Bush or Kerry. What a choice. |
