Western Journalism
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.
Obama’s administration has benefited from major censorship by the media
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.
Read More: MRC Special Reports
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