MSM Bias

For months -- years? -- I've been beating the drum about the self-evident bias in the MSM for liberal candidates and causes.  Perhaps I'm the canary in the mineshaft along with my fellow citizens disgusted by the blatant favoritism dressed up at journalism as it's practiced at the major news outlets in this country.  Most of the time, people simply yawn and turn away.  But recent developments really call for greater scrutiny.

This past week, George Stephanopolous, the moderator of the Sunday morning political talk show This Week and one of the anchors of Good Morning America was discovered to have donated $75,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative for such endeavors as the fight againts AIDS and other noble causes.  In and of itself, there's no problem with the donations.  But the fact that he never disclosed this fact to the public and continued to act as an impartial interviewer of political themes calls into question his bias.  In fact, just before the public disclosure, Mr. Stephanopolous interviewed Peter Scheweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, an expose of the Clintons' ties to big money and usages of those connections.  Here's the interview:

Let's not forget: Not only did Mr. Stephanopolous donate money to the Clintons' foundation, he used to work for Mr. Clinton when he was President.  If nothing else, he should have recused himself from doing the interview to avoid the appearance of impropriety due to his previous position.  To ask Mr. Schweizer about his connections to the Bush White House is almost laughable, especially when the CGI donation scandal was hanging in the air.  Mr. Stephanopolous apologized publicly for his omission, and ABC later called it a simple mistake, but for a public that relies on the media to be its watchdog on the government, this is a serious breach of trust.

Earlier, Bob Schieffer, a well-known liberal commentator, announced his retirement from Face the Nation, and CBS quickly named as his successor John Dickerson, the political director for CBS.  Mr. Dickerson wrote for Slate magazine and penned this ditty:

Go for the Throat!
Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.

... A second inaugural suggests new beginnings, but this one is being bookended by dead-end debates. Gridlock over the fiscal cliff preceded it and gridlock over the debt limit, sequester, and budget will follow. After the election, the same people are in power in all the branches of government and they don't get along. There's no indication that the president's clashes with House Republicans will end soon.

... The challenge for President Obama’s speech is the challenge of his second term: how to be great when the environment stinks. Enhancing the president’s legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems. Washington’s partisan rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.

... Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition's most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

... This approach is not a path of gentle engagement. It requires confrontation and bright lines and tactics that are more aggressive than the president demonstrated in the first term. He can't turn into a snarling hack. The posture is probably one similar to his official second-term photograph: smiling, but with arms crossed.

The president already appears to be headed down this path. He has admitted he’s not going to spend much time improving his schmoozing skills; he's going to get outside of Washington to ratchet up public pressure on Republicans. He is transforming his successful political operation into a governing operation. It will have his legacy and agenda in mind—and it won’t be affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, so it will be able to accept essentially unlimited donations. The president tried to use his political arm this way after the 2008 election, but he was constrained by re-election and his early promises of bipartisanship. No more. Those days are done.

It is unthinkable that a person writing a blueprint for the destruction of a political party can in any way be unbiased when it comes to reporting or interviewing.  That anyone believes the MSM is impartial and unbiased is living in an earlier time and under a rock.

Let's not forget that CBS News' President is David Rhodes.  He only happens to be the brother of Ben Rhodes, currently the deputy national security advisor for strategic communication.  Technically, his title is Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication and Speechwriting.

Well.

Mr. Stephanopolous made a point to question Mr. Schweizer's Bush ties and whether they had anything to do with the book he wrote about the Clintons.  Isn't it only fair to question whether Mr. Stephanopolous's ties to Clintons had anything to do with the way he interviewed Mr. Schweizer?  Or how Mr. Dickerson will treat the White House during the balance of the Obama administration?  Or how CBS reports news about the Obama administration?

How is it that the media is allowed to get away with this?  The last time a MSM was this closely tied to government was when Josef Goebbels and Leni Refinstahl worked for the Nazis.

This isn't Nazi Germany.  This should not be allowed.

I would love to put any of these flacks on the witness stand under oath and ask them questions about how they conducted their work.

The answers they would give would be sad or they would be scary.

This is un-American.  The Fourth Estate, as my liberal friend once presciently noted, is letting down the country.

(c) 2015 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles

Liberal Idiocy

Apologists, from what I'm gleaning from various reports, are trying to suggest that the jihadi attempt in Garland, Texas, that was foiled heroically by an off-duty police officer, could have been avoided had the cartoonists not poke the Islamofascist bear by exercising their First Amendment rights.  I'm stupified.

There very same apologists try to say, at the same time from the other side of their mouths, that they support the concept of Free Speech.  Although there is a philosophical argument that can be made in a vacuum that the right to exercise one's freedom of speech includes the right to withhold said exercise, in reality the two are mutually exclusive.

To not engage in the freedom of speech intended by the cartoonists who were going to have a contest to see whose depiction of the prophet Mohammed was deemed the best would have been, necessarily, to curtail freedom of speech due to fear.  Liberals love to declare freedom of speech when the speech they support bothers conservatives, but when speech such as this contemplated in Garland, Texas, is supported by conservatives, they make excuses for why it shouldn't be exercised.

The utter hypocrisy of the situation is galling.  Where were these voices of restraint when Robert Maplethorpe was displaying his very graphic sexual photos that offended so many Christian people? Or when artwork was making the rounds involving a crucifix in a jar of urine.  Where were the apologists suggesting that this artwork shouldn't be displayed?  Nay, they were championing freedom of expression and lecturing the rest of us to restrain our impulses, the same impulses jihadis act on now.

Just because Christians don't put people to death whom they believe blaspheme what they believe doesn't make their offense any less valuable.  Muslims may well take great offense to what the cartoonists were doing, but that doesn't entitle them to silence the cartoonists by killing them.  And that the cartoonists' actions provoke howls of disagreement is beside the point; just as we Christians had to restrain ourselves when the other putative artists were poking at us, so too must Muslims behave in a civilized manner -- or leave the country.

Liberal apologists miss the point:  The First Amendment especially protects offensive speech.  The only limitations on free speech are those that time, place and manner impose because of the dangerous nature of the speech, e.g., yelling out Fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire.  Just as Christians had to endure the blasphemous works of so-called artists, so too must Muslims -- and their liberal apologists -- sit on the sidelines and seethe quietly.  As loathesome as the Westboro Baptist Church expressions have been, they are allowed -- with time, place and manner restrictions, but still allowed.  The same must hold true for cartoonists and others whose speech offends a segment of society.

Muslims are emboldened by our failure to depend the Constitution.  Their bellicose threats and transparently false grievances allow them to push an agenda that is unacceptable to the vast majority of people here.  No bacon in restaurants because it isn't halal.  Neither is it kosher for orthodox Jews, but no one sees them threatening Subway shops.  It's ludicrous that we kow-tow to their demands in the name of political correctness unaware of what it's doing to the very essence of our Constitution.

Yet, I'm not surprised by this.  The liberal mantra -- do as we say, not as we do -- underlies the liberal approach to all things constitutional in this country.   So if the majority of this country is offended by their urgings of restraint of freedom of speech, we should just sit back and say nothing.  If we're offended by someone else's free speech, we should sit back and say nothing.

Soon enough, with the imposition of sharia law, it won't be a question of choosing to remain silent.

We'll either be quiet or have our heads lopped off.

(c) 2015 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles