Omitting for Obama:
Table of Contents:
- Omitting for Obama:
- Introduction
- Van Jones
- ACORN
- Obama's Aide and Mao
- ClimateGate
- Conclusion
Executive Summary
The Obama administration was embarrassed by a series of revelations
about its most radical actions, assumptions, and associations in 2009.
While Fox News and the conservatives on talk radio and the Internet
broke and developed these stories, Americans following only the
"mainstream" media would never have heard these reports. Instead of
acting as government watchdogs holding the people in power accountable,
the nation’s broadcast news networks deliberately suppressed and de facto censored embarrassing scoops – at least until President Obama or Congress took action and made them impossible to ignore.
In many cases, this resistance to real news extended even to newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times,
which are supposed to be more substantive and thorough than highly-paid
TV news talking heads or unpaid bloggers. A Media Research Center study
of four such stories highlighted by the New Media in 2009 that were
damaging to the Obama "brand" found that the news was not only slow in
arriving, it was fast in disappearing:
# Van Jones. On
September 3, blogger Jim Hoft reported that Obama "green jobs" guru Van
Jones had signed a petition in 2004 demanding a probe into charges the
Bush administration "deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to
occur." Fox News Channel jumped on the story. But it didn’t draw a
single story on ABC or NBC until after Jones resigned his office at the
very start of September 6. CBS filed one, and ABC five. NBC never
devoted a single full story to Jones (just mentioned him as a
distraction in eight pieces). They noticed a few outrageous Jones
remarks like suggesting a black child would never shoot up a school,
but never noticed Jones calling himself a communist. Even the
newspapers were stubborn in their avoidance: the Washington Post failed to publish a story until the morning before Jones resigned, and the New York Times failed to publish a story until after he resigned.
# ACORN.
On September 10, the website Big Government exposed with shocking
hidden-camera footage how the leftist Association of Community
Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) in Baltimore advised a man and woman
posing as a pimp and a prostitute how to shelter their illegal income
from taxes, even as they claimed they were bringing in under-age girls
from Latin America to be their sex workers. While the video aired
heavily on Fox News, the broadcast network evening news shows stayed
silent for five days until Congress moved to deny the group’s millions
in federal funding. (ABC broke the network blackout on Saturday
morning, September 12 to briefly note the Census Bureau cut off ties to
the group.) While the journalists kept releasing videos from ACORN
offices – in Washington D.C., Brooklyn, and San Diego – in the end, ABC
and CBS aired only one full story, NBC three. As the rest of the
country was laughing at Jay Leno ACORN skits, the networks didn’t find
it a laughing proposition when President Obama claimed to George
Stephanopoulos: "Frankly, it’s not something I've followed closely,"
adding he had not been aware that ACORN received much federal money.
None noted the comment or Obama’s long relationship with the group in
Chicago, working as an ACORN trainer and even as ACORN’s attorney in
court.
# Obama’s Aide and Mao. After White House
communications director Anita Dunn slammed Fox News Channel as either
"the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party" in
October, Glenn Beck’s FNC show unearthed video of her speaking at a
2009 graduation where she lightly declared that mass-murdering Chinese
communist dictator Mao Zedong was "one of my favorite philosophers."
This speech clip was completely ignored by ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, and the New York Times.
# Climategate. In late November, the New York Times
reported that hacked e-mails from climate researchers at the University
of East Anglia in England exposed how the scientific experts cited so
often by the media on global warming called their opponents "idiots,"
proposed censoring them from scientific journals, and twisted
scientific data to support their policy agenda. This would be a
bombshell if the hacked e-mails came from an oil company manipulating
data, calling their opponents idiots, and proposing they be censored.
The scandal threatened to ruin President Obama’s campaign to push for
drastic energy-reduction goals at a summit in Copenhagen. The networks
ignored it for two entire weeks, and then when they decided to cover
it, ABC, CBS, and NBC each only gave these revelations two full
stories, which denigrated the scandal’s political or scientific
importance. Compared to those six stories, the Big Three devoted 57
full stories and interviews during the same two weeks to the less
substantive White House "gate crasher" scandal after the first Obama
state dinner.
The report concludes that the Old Media are in
danger of losing even more audience members as long as they refuse to
acknowledge news until after Democrats in Congress or the White House
decide it’s news. As much as the Old Media has suggested the New Media
are guilty of a lack of credentials or professionalism, their
performance in 2009 suggests that providing political protection for
Obama means more than professionalism to the media establishment.
