How the Old Media Deliberately Censored New Media Scoops in 2009

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

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Rich in Excuses

America has gone from the land of personal responsibility to the land of pathetic excuse-making, from top down, bottom up; and worse, to accepting of excuses – and the entire thing should be a cause for visceral disgust. The ‘culture of excuse acceptability’ has led us to this point, and if we don’t reverse it, it will doom us. Examples are everywhere: A whole clown car full of government incompetents damn near got 200+ people blown out of the sky on Christmas Day and not one has stepped up to say, “I screwed up, and I resign – and I’m giving back my pay for the past year as I go out the door, my head hung in shame.” The watchdogs that for years let Madoff go on defrauding people of millions all have. Why haven’t they all been fired? Or had the honor to throw themselves on their swords? And when will something – anything – be Obama’s responsibility? (An Associated Press report in the Sunday newspapers says that the Democrats’ mid-term 2010 strategy will be to blame Bush. Maybe by the end of Obama’s third term, he’ll take ownership of something. The media goes along with all this rather cheerfully. I believe I’ve caught talking-heads on every network pondering the Christmas terrorist’s motivations. He comes from an affluent family, he has a good education; why, oh why, would he hate us so? What have we done to him? Well, perhaps he just wasn’t held enough as a child.
How ‘bout all those folks who bought homes they couldn’t possibly afford by taking out mortgages without bothering to read or make sure they understood the documents? Well, that’s the bankers’ fault, of course. And the obese waddling about? Fast food industry devils. People who knew the industry in which they were employed was shrinking and inevitably dying, and who had years to prepare themselves financially, educationally and professionally to adapt are just the victims of evil out-sourcers. I cringe even when my local TV news describes somebody assaulted at 3:00 A.M. in a dark public park known as a drug dealing mart, across the street from a night-club famous for after-hours violence, as a “victim.” Seems to me he was more of a “volunteer.” And we all might be better served by identifying him as such.
We desperately need more honest public discussion. Calling acts of terrorism and war against America, intended to mass-murder us “man-caused disasters” is embarrassing. Arguing over the merits of extending government run health care to illegal immigrants is insane; what part of the word “illegal” is incomprehensible or ambiguous? Extending some version of “the Twinkie defense” for every imaginable act of irresponsibility is not helping us at all. Somali pirates aren’t at fault; they’re poor, and deserve our compassionate understanding. At what point do we raise the matter of personal responsibility?A report in my Sunday paper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, says 1 in 8 Americans receive food stamps – 1 in 8. Liberals would say it is shameful for America, the richest nation on earth to permit 1 of every 8 of its citizens to live in such poor conditions. We need to say it is shameful for many of these food stamp recipients to be in such a situation and to continue relying on hand-outs. We need to ask them what they are doing to remedy their situation, to improve their circumstances. I am not insensitive to those in temporary trouble; when I was young, my parents were on food stamps for about two months. I know trouble can arrive uninvited. But I also know that, among these 1 in 8, are huge numbers of long-term losers not exerting the slightest effort to fix their problems and get off the dole. And we have methodically removed the shame and stigma, even the inconvenience of getting the hand-out; it is electronically deposited to food-stamp cards on the 1st of each month – a time that Wal-Mart reports a sales surge. There’s no shame in being broke. There is shame in staying broke, in this, the richest-in-opportunity nation on earth. So far it looks like the new decade, even more than the last, will be one of tolerating, sanctioning, accepting – even celebrating – entitlement, victimhood, and abdication of personal responsibility. It’s an unsustainable philosophy for the nation. If it is accepted as norm, financial and moral bankruptcy will inevitably follow. If we are rich in excuses, we’ll be rich in nothing else.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Bonus's

The network news media cheered when Obama called for restrictions on CEO pay or bonuses that, according to reporters, exemplify the Wall Street “greed” that toppled the American economy.
But when $42 million in cash compensation packages were announced on Christmas Eve for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives, the networks couldn’t muster any anger toward the highly connected groups. Although Fannie and Freddie were two government-sponsored enterprises whose excessive risk taking contributed significantly to the housing crisis, the networks barely reported the story at all.But since the Christmas Eve announcement of millions in salaries and bonuses and the Obama administration’s pledge of “unlimited financial assistance” to the mortgage giants, ABC and CBS offered a total of three brief mentions totaling 175 words about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. NBC hasn’t mentioned them at all.Not a single one of those reports used the word “bonus” or mentioned the decision to extend the credit line of both government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), which already required more than $100 billion from taxpayers.