There’s a script that conservatives covering scandals involving liberals like to use, and it’s getting on my nerves.
First, Fox News and the blogs break a scandal, then they talk about the scandal for a few days, then they start talking about how no one in the mainstream media is covering it, then, if it does get some mainstream media coverage, the conservatives talk about how the mainstream media thinks they’re all racist.
It has hit a fever pitch in the past few weeks with Glenn Beck and the 9/12 rally and the ACORN prostitution scandal. Now, whenever a scandal breaks, conservatives complain about biased media coverage before the story even starts to make waves. On just the second day of the ACORN scandal, Beck put up graphics showing the lack of coverage by outlets outside of Fox. And you can count on Beck to end any segment about ACORN with a line to the effect: “Well, I wonder if the media will cover this. I don’t think so.”
Look, I agree that the media is biased, but it just becomes repetitious and useless — and meaningless, too — to bring up media bias with every story, sometimes even before the rest of the media has had much of a chance to cover that story. Besides, Fox News is by far the most influential media outlet in the country. Fox and the blogosphere have gotten Jones fired, ACORN dropped from the Census, and had ACORN funding dropped in a Senate amendment that passed 83-7, all while the Democrats have had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a huge majority in House.
People like Bernie Goldberg are basically making a career out of attacking the mainstream media. Goldberg wants us to come up with another phrase for the “mainstream media.” I’d point out that the phrase “mainstream media” has already taken on a very negative connotation, but if you don’t like that phrase, you’ve got the “lamestream media,” the “drive-by media,” the “tanning bed media,” and the “ostrich media,” as Michelle Malkin suggests, among others.
The message conservatives should be conveying is that ACORN is corrupt, not that the media is biased, a sentiment that the vast majority of Americans agree with already.
Conservatives’ preoccupation with media bias and hypocrisy creates a lot of pointless non-stories where each side throws mud at the other just because someone threw mud at them in the past. A few examples from this week include the pro-life activist who was killed and a fight in a school bus between black kids and a white kid.
The school bus fight is just an example of some unruly black kids beating up a white kid. But just because Al Sharpton goes insane sometimes when white kids act racially, I am supposed to be outraged that black kids did so in St. Louis.
That’s just tit-for-tat, but then you have the cases where one side just can’t accept that a member of their favored part did something stupid. That’s the case with the controversy surrounding Joe Wilson, the Congressman who heckled President Obama during Obama’s speech to Congress last week.
There is no doubt that Obama misinformed the public and that the Democrats greatly overreacting by censuring Joe Wilson, but Obama was speaking at a joint session to Congress, not a townhall, and there are few, if any examples, of a president being interrupted in such a manner by a Congressman in the recent past.
Right after the controversy broke, conservatives trotted out a video of some Democrats lightly booing Bush during his 2005 State of the Union address. In that address, there was a sprinkling of boos at one point, but no one ever interrupted him with heckling.
Now some blogs have pulled out the transcript of Pete Stark calling Bush a liar on the floor of Congress in 2007. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air said, “If Pelosi wants to censure Wilson, then she has unfinished business from 2007 to attend to first.” But the controversy is not about Wilson calling Obama a liar, the controversy is about Wilson interrupting Obama’s speech and calling him a liar during his speech. Until the bloggers can find a video of Pete Stark threatening to throw Bush out a window during his State of the Union, they don’t have an argument for hypocrisy.
But even then, they can’t defend Wilson. We should be able to agree that if one party does something stupid, it is still stupid when the other party does it. Whining about hypocrisy only gives the other side an excuse when their guy does the same.
Ultimately, Wilson’s heckling of Obama is a non-story, and the bloggers’ efforts to defend Wilson will only detract from their important efforts to stop ACORN and ObamaCare.
Mitchell Blatt is a regular contributor to The D.C. Writeup. He blogs at mitchellblatt.com.
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September 17th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Yes, how dare Fox cover this story. They should cover-up the story like the rest of the press. It really gets irritating to see them doing some reporting.
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September 17th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Yes how dare you actually read my article and quote me accurately.
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