In 25 years in the new business, technology journalist Michael Malone has seen nothing to match the journalistic malpractice we are witnessing this year.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.
The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.
No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.
If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.
That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
Joe the Plumber
The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.
Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.
Malone thinks media news editors are desperate. Facing career catastrophe in a dying industry, they hope a Hail Mary play will bring home a miracle.
And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.
With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.
But miracles take more than just a few flexible politicians. Public opinion must be marshalled behind the kind of legislative miracles big media is looking for, and that takes money. In a Washington Times editorial Richard W. Rahn, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, explains where the money might come from, and why certain extraordinarily wealthy people seem oddly willing to hold still for what ought to be a very painful bite from tax hikes.
Have you ever wondered why billionaires like George Soros financially support politicians who say they will "increase taxes on the rich"?
The answer quite simply is that the tax increases are most often put on people trying to become rich, not those already rich. Hence, the rich, big government advocates can gain far more by "buying" the politicians. The "bought" politicians then provide them with confidential information about administrative decisions, which these donors then use to place big bets in the market, making themselves much richer. If you have deep financial pockets and inside information, you can make huge amounts of money when markets drop.
Mr. Soros, the Democrats' financial angel, is often referred to as the "man who broke the bank of England" in the 1992 Sterling crisis. During that episode, he made $1 billion in one day at the expense of British taxpayers. The relevant question is, did Mr. Soros bet a couple of billion dollars on mere guesses of what the German, French and British officials would do, or did he have inside information?
A reference to www.capitalresearch.org in Mr. Rahn's column pointed me to an article by Matthew Sheffield and Noel Sheppard entitled from Inside the Disinformation Machine: A Look at the Left’s New Media Operation. The authors describe how the super rich help their politicians by assisting journalists in a more direct way.
ProPublica, a new nonprofit journalism outfit funded by the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation ($1,250,000 in fiscal 2007), proposes to sustain “investigative journalism in the public interest” by supporting journalists who will write stories that have “moral force.” This no doubt means articles attacking what liberals consider social injustice. Ironically, the nonprofit group Pro Publica, Inc.’s donors are Herb and Marion Sandler, who have arguably profited from homeowners’ distress. In May 2006 they fortuitously sold Golden West, their California savings and loan, to Wachovia for $25.5 billion—just before the credit crisis swamped Wachovia, which had foolishly acquired Golden West’s adjustable rate mortgage portfolio.
The super wealthy have always managed to get key politicians in their pockets. Once journalists decided that they, themselves, were the real movers and shakers in this world, shaping public opinion as they do, the super rich decided it was time to start pocketing journalists. They've gotten pretty good at it. It's not media bias. It's corruption.
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