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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Documents Reveal 2008 Media Pro-Obama Plotting

The Daily Caller has blown the lid off of plotting by lefty journalists to protect Obama during the 2008 campaign. An examination of the now infamous Journolist listserv reveals journalists in action – to help bring about the election of Obama instead of doing good journalism.

The Daily Caller story focuses on the list’s reactions to Obama’s (then) pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous statements finally becoming an issue in the mainstream media. It suffices to say the journalists were not happy about that. They wanted those inconvenient utterings ignored.

How to bury the story? One journalist advised using the race card:

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Others advocated an attack on journalists who dared to ask Obama about the Rev. Wright’s statements and his slowness to disavow those statements. And that is exactly what they did in an open letter.

The tenor of many posts from the journalists was that they considered their role was to further the election of Obama more than to get the facts out. Spencer Ackerman again (And, admittedly, this may be a bit extreme, even for the list.):

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?


And is this not what we often see played out in the news media?

Read the whole story. It is revealing indeed.

I have long stated that the “mainstream” news media has a lot to answer for in not vetting Obama in 2008. And I have long maintained that the MNM is biased. But I have more or less dismissed that there is conspiracy involved.

Now I am not so sure.

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