BLANKLEY: Media chronicles
Obama remains unknown
Tony Blankley
Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08 for the first time, the major media are consciously covering for one candidate for president and consciously knifing the other. This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly and even half way honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs — the press.

The image of Barack Obama that the press has presented is not a fair approximation of the real man. They have consciously ignored whole years in his life, and showed a lack of curiosity about such gaps that bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct. Thus, the public image of Mr. Obama is of a "Man who never was." I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real life WWII British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than Italy, in 1943. Operation "Mincemeat" involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as a Maj. William Martin, R.M. and put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a brief-case containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.

To make the operation credible, British intelligence created a fictional life for the corpse — a letter from a lover, tickets to a London theater, all the details of a life — but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media has presented to the nation as Mr. Obama is not the real man.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeats any McCain gaffes, while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Internet sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Mr. Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventual one or two clear sentences from Mr. Obama. Nor do you see Mr. Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the United Nations. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.

More appalling, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" suggested that Gov. Sarah Palin's husband had sex with his own daughters. That scene was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate for Senate in Minnesota. Talk about incest.


Democratic presidential candidate Sen.Barack Obama, D-Ill., greets supporters before his speech in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina on September 21, 2008. (UPI Photo/Nell Redmond)

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting, is the shocking gaps in Mr. Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply has not reported on Mr. Obama's two years at Columbia University in New York, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers— after which they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Mr. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Mr. Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks the media has focused on all the colleges Mrs. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago and the close criticism of Mrs. Palin's mayoral political opponents. But in two years they haven't bothered to see how close Mr. Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Mr. Obama's rise in Chicago politics — how did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great — and unflattering details on Mr. Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book, the mainstream media continues to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, the Economist, to give Mr. Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.

The public image of Mr. Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Mr. Obama, his publicist David Axelrod and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor has written that "the media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis." That conspiracy has not only photo-shopped out all of Mr. Obama's imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent Mr. McCain's image), but it has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.

The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Mr. Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.

Tony Blankley is a syndicated columnist.


http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/24/media-chronicles/

Corporate media...

CNN should be ONN - Obama News Network, they are his Cheerleader

CNN tries to stay in the middle more than the other ones.

You and I both know that the talking heads just spout the talking points sent down to them from the top of the global corporate structures that own them.

CNN, MSNBC, FOX, they aren't there to inform us, they are there to mislead, divide and assist in our being conquered. From the looks of how partisan everything is, they appear to be doing a mighty fine job.


While everyone is fighting about non issues, they are running away with our Constitution. We might as well just get ready for the NAU.

sure they do

What source do you consider unbiased?

I agree... CNN has tried to remain neutral but they have not been very sucessful at it.

The worst one I have seen has been MSNBC.

I have actually wondered if they were hired by the Democratic Party.

Thats a tough call, but my first reaction is to say Alex Jones on the GCN radio network.

He doesn't pick sides, even though he's a typical texas conservative. He lays the blame where ever it needs to go.
He does have kind of a crazy man format, but he always says to go look up what he is saying for yourselves and when I do that he's right.

I probably agree with about 80%, give or take, with what he says and he's only bias is right/wrong, Good/evil.

I sure don't trust the tube. I'll listen to them, but I know who signs their checks.

I agree with you about CNN and MSNBC is definitely pro Obama just like most of FOX is lets say pro REP as much as McCain..But parts of Fox I like because they go for straight up answers from Both sides even tho the lean towards the right..

Have any of you watched or read Canadian, German and British news?

My approach is to get my news from multiple sources liberal, conservative and fringe, foreign and domestic and then to see what they have in common and why they might be selectively reporting certain facts.

Thats what I try to do as well. There's a saying: There is always 3 sides to every story, your side, their side and the truth.

and while ya'll are trying to hang your hat on whichever media outlet is the most truthful remember this,

all media outlets exist for one purpose. that is to sell YOU to their advertisers and make money from commercials. They are going to tell you whatever you want to hear to keep you watching

We agree on something.

I do that as well. And i even get my news from fark.com =D

Yes... I agree with this whole heartedly.