WE CONSERVATIVES never tire of asking, hypothetically, how the mainstream American press would cover Obama scandals and failures if he were a Republican. The implied indictment is all but inarguably true, but the mainstream media -- led by its hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil journalism reviews -- simply ignore the point, refuting it with nothing more persuasive than studied indifference.
Still . . .
. . . Peter Wehner recently made the case again, and particularly well. Let's give him a listen on the IRS scandal.
Here's a thought experiment. Assume during the George W. Bush administration the IRS had targeted MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, the Center for American Progress, and a slew of other liberal groups. Assume, too, that no conservative groups were the subject of harassment and intimidation. And just for the fun of it, assume that press secretary Ari Fleischer had misled the press and the public by saying the scandal was confined to two rogue IRS agents in Cincinnati and that President Bush had declared that there was "not even a smidgen of corruption" that had occurred.
Let's go a step further. Assume that the IRS Commissioner, in testifying before Congress, admitted that the emails of the person at the heart of the abuse of power scandal were gone, that the backup tapes have been erased and that her hard drive was destroyed. For good measure, assume that the person who was intimately involved in targeting liberal groups took the Fifth Amendment.
Given all this, boys and girls, do you think the elite media -- the New York Times, Washington Post, The News Hour, and the news networks for ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN -- would pay attention to it?
Answer: They wouldn't just cover the story; they would fixate on it. It would be a crazed obsession. Journalists up and down the Acela Corridor would be experiencing dangerously rapid pulse rates. The gleam in their eyes and the spring in their step would be impossible to miss. You couldn't escape the coverage even if you wanted to. The story would sear itself into your imagination.
It's true enough that one could focus on media bias every day between now and the Second Coming if one were so inclined. But rarely is the bias as transparent, and the double standard as glaring, as it is during the coverage of scandals. That doesn't mean that here and there elite journalists don't focus attention on liberal scandals. But for a host of complicated political and cultural reasons, the press as a general matter draws much greater energy and purposefulness from scandals involving Republican presidents than Democratic presidents.
. . . . And here's the thing: many journalists really and truly believe they are impartial. Which is but only one reason why we live in an era when America's trust of the media is at an all-time low.
(Peter Wehner, "The IRS Scandal and Media Bias," commentarymagazine.com, June 24, 2014)
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