The Media and McCain
I watched some CNN this morning and quickly grew sick of it. It was a news-like discussion of why the charges against McCain are completely baseless and are nothing but “left-wing bloggers” trying to assassinate his character. They focused only on the affair part of the NYT story; they showed McCain’s “I’m not going to talk about this anymore” statement in full. They reported that Huckabee trusts McCain. They concluded that nothing would come from the story.
Not a single mention of the lobbyist side of the report, which is the real story. Not one mention that McCain indeed did favors for lobbyists back then. Nor that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists now, around 30 on his campaign, more than any other campaign. Nor that McCain has been caught in at least one and maybe two major lies in the story. None of that–just a clean sweep of “McCain’s completely innocent” claptrap.
What’s with this? In a little while, I’ll be posting a post-debate summary of the Texas “showdown” between Obama and Clinton, where CNN was the host–and showed a similar tendency toward rather overt bias.
Not a single mention of the lobbyist side of the report, which is the real story.
No surprise there, right?
The people who pay the lobbyist salary are the same people who pay journalist’s salaries.
Those journalist have sweet set up. They don’t want to lose that.
Anyway it’s our job, and especially, when the time is right, it’ll be Obama’s job to point out the contradictions. As long as Obamamania stays on track, the journalist will start gravelling for access.
The idea that it’s a leftist plot is silly. Really, most lefties don’t care that much about the sex type corruption, just money type corruption: the real inequity. That will be McCains problem, that and the 100 years of vanity war and the “don’t know much about the economy” meme.
I said it somewhere here or some other blog, McCain swiftboats himself.
Perhaps the NYT did not understand the real point of the story itself, nor did the quite liberal Michael Kinsley :http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/25/AR2008022501089.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR
It is disheartening to see that when the election itself gets here that despite Obama’s idea of change, of an election on issues, that many of his supporters will be more than happy to resort to the “politics of the past.” This will grow more when the pros from Billary joins Obama supporters should he become the candidate. Hopefully he can overcome these tendencies of his own supporters or else we are going to have an election based on counting lobbyists (are you really going to try to claim that McCain has been in the pocket of lobbyists to the extent other politicians of both parties are? Or is you claim that he is not pure? Are you really sure Obama is?)
What exactly are the two lies that McCain was caught in? I missed that, too. I am one of those Republicans who are supporting Obama, but I wonder if I can continue after the election starts and Hollywood loony-left starts working for Obama and the left-wing interest groups start demanding their piece of the pie, if I can continue to support him, or if I will just sit out another election.