Pick an Obama scandal and the media skipped it, covered it up, or buried it beneath some bogus outrage about the right
… the political bloc that most helped push Obama to reelection was the American media
writes
Dan Gainor.
All throughout election night, pundits and reporters were talking about the economy
and how that had impacted the campaign. That was seldom the story the news media told throughout the election.
According to several exit polls, Romney’s lead on the economy was small
and many voters actually thought it was improving, despite years of
economic cataclysm. “But Romney is winning early on a key question in
the exit poll: Who can better handle the economy? He scored 49 percent
to Obama's 48 percent there, though those numbers are still moving,”
reported ABC.
No wonder. Networks that hammered President George W. Bush for high gas
prices and high unemployment gave their candidate almost a complete pass
– blaming Bush more than twice as much as Obama. On Election Day,
unemployment was 7.9 percent, actually higher than it had been when
Obama took office. Debt, deficit and underemployment were off the
charts.
Obama didn’t win despite the numbers. He won because the media didn’t
report them. They spent an entire campaign promoting social issues –
abortion, gay marriage and more – where journalists near 100 percent
support. The onslaught against GOP candidates was huge. The left/media
strategy was merely to link Romney with any social conservative they
could and hype what that candidate said.
Media Research Center President L. Brent Bozell
summed up the campaign news coverage by calling journalism “roadkill.”
“The media lauded Obama no matter how horrendous his record, and they
savaged Obama’s Republican contenders as ridiculous pretenders,” he
wrote.
On Election Day, the media did what they always do – blamed
conservatives. CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked the question whether “the
Republican Party went too far to the right.” Earlier in the evening,
Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger blamed the Tea Party for Senate
losses, instead of crediting them with motivating GOP grassroots voters.
“Has the Tea Party really hurt the Republican chances in the last two
elections to take control of the Senate?” she asked.
NBC’s Chuck Todd echoed the theme, saying “The Republican party has some serious soul-searching to do.”
In the last days before the election, journalists resorted to one of
their old tricks – celebrating a “conservative” who goes off the
reservation (sorry, Sen. Warren) and backs the left. In this case, the
media foil was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
whose adoration of Obama in the post-hurricane era resembled a
school-boy crush and outlet after outlet celebrated the love story.
Liberal MSNBC
reveled in Christie’s comments. “The Last Word” ran a compilation of
Christie throwing his support to the president. Major media outlets
didn’t raise the question whether Christie was trying to boost his own
2016 campaign. Suspicious reporters might have asked whether Christie, who had been passed over for Romney’s VP slot, might have been a tad bitter.
Why that mattered is that exit polls indicated 41 percent of voters thought Obama’s storm performance had been either “important” or “most important” in their vote.
The campaign spin wasn’t new. Journalists consistently bashed Tea Party
candidates or downplayed their success like new Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. At
the same time, they ignored how incredibly radical the Democratic Party
had become.
Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were savaged for
being out of the mainstream by the press. However, journalists yawned as
Democrats continued their massive leftward shift with Fauxcahontas
candidate Elizabeth Warren and the first openly gay senator, Wisconsin’s
Tammy Baldwin.
It was more than that. Pick an Obama scandal and the media skipped it,
covered it up or buried it beneath some bogus outrage about the right.
"Fast and furious," Libya, jobs, the collapse of Arab Spring, the failed
trillion-dollar stimulus, the cost of ObamaCare, the attack on
religious rights and even bowing to foreign leaders – none of them got
the press that made-up scandals about Romney received.
That bias culminated in a now famous debate scene with CNN’s Candy
Crowley where she incorrectly fact-checked Romney and boosted Obama.
Crowley’s action became the perfect metaphor for the bias of campaign
2012 – a media campaign far worse than 2008.
And the worst news of the night? Election 2016 starts today and somewhere journalists are already spinning the result.
