Text 7324, 116 rader
Skriven 2008-08-23 05:33:00 av TIM RICHARDSON (1:123/140)
Ärende: Dumbocrats
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Our Sick Edwards-Excusing Media


by L. Brent Bozell III


August 12, 2008

You know there are some in the liberal media who have simply lost
touch with reality when the headline reads "John Edwards Cheats on
Wife With Cancer" and they ask with great detachment whether he'll
be able to run for office again soon. These people's morality is
so bizarre that they showed more outrage at John McCain featuring a
picture of Paris Hilton in a commercial for two eye-blinks than
for Edwards catting around on a dying spouse.


For months (and more hotly in the last two weeks), the National
Enquirer has been trickling out the goods they collected on John
Edwards having an affair and possibly a love child with campaign
aide Rielle Hunter, staking out Edwards in a California hotel;
and how he hid in the bathroom to avoid them.


There's a quick campaign ad on the two parties in a nutshell.


Republican George Bush took on Osama bin Laden and took out Saddam
Hussein. Democrat John Edwards hides in a bathroom from the
tabloids.


Throughout this time, the very same media that almost immediately
spread unproven trash on John McCain's alleged "romantic"
relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman because the source was the
allegedly professional New York Times now remained as quiet as a
cabin full of Carthusian monks. Only when everyone was familiar
with the story thanks to the New Media and Edwards was forced to
confess did the networks break their obedient silence.


Anyone watching the TV stories found a tone of sadness, of the
outraged disappointment of Edwards supporters like campaign
manager David Bonior. That’s acceptable. But the story came almost
entirely from within the Edwards bubble. You couldn't find in these stories
any time for Republicans, and it was rare to find anyone asking
not about Edwards, but about the Democrats in general. How would this
taint them?


When the question emerged briefly on television, it had a
perish-the-thought tone to it. On "Sunday Today" two days after
the Edwards confession, NBC anchor Lester Holt asked the apparently
unthinkable: "Is Obama touched or tainted by this in any stretch
of the imagination?" NBC political analyst Chuck Todd was fervent in
his reply: "I don't think he is at all, Lester. You know, if
anything, sure, that they lose a good surrogate. This was a guy
who was very good on the stump."


Holt worried that the Republicans might stoop so low as to speak
of Edwards: "Is there any stomach for John McCain perhaps using,
taking some political advantage of this, or will he simply leave this
alone as a third rail?" (Translation: we would like to make this an
untouchable third rail.) Todd was emphatic once again: " Not at
all.


They're probably going to leave this alone. John McCain had to
deal with a story that their campaign was very upset about, that The
New York Times did. They're not going to touch this. You know, stuff
like this usually ends up getting swept under the rug pretty
quickly."


But the networks didn’t sweep this under the rug. They sat on top
of the dirty rug for months while the Enquirer dug out the Edwards
affair, and now that it’s out, they want it swept right back under
the rug before the Democratic convention. It's unthinkable (to
them) that this should taint the Democrats in any way. Even stranger,
Todd thinks that McCain being slimed by the New York Times should shame
him into shutting up, when it certainly didn't provoke any shame
within Todd’s profession. They all ran that story without taking a
coffee break to investigate the skimpy evidence for themselves.


This is not the network "news" approach when the scandal shoe is
on the other foot. Ask yourself: what did Rev. Ted Haggard's use of
drugs and male prostitutes in Colorado have to do with the
national Republican Party? Or Mark Foley's dirty Internet messages to
congressional pages? Yet every time they it’s happened to a
Republican, the media worked strenuously to spread the tar and
underline the damage to the GOP.


What did Larry Craig's shoe placement in an airport bathroom in
2007 have to do with the Republican Party as a whole? The media treated
that story as a much larger scoop than John Edwards cheating on
the wife dying of cancer. It was a story that led the news (certainly
on Chuck Todd's NBC) for days and days. Here's Matt Lauer on day one:
"Can the right wing withstand yet another scandal involving one of
its own?"


The networks repeatedly displayed the Edwards marriage as a
fairy-tale story of two lawyers celebrating their anniversaries
over a chocolate Frosty at Wendy’s. Now we know it was bunk. For them
to act like there was nothing shameful or hypocritical to expose here
is another explicit display of their Democratic favoritism.




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