More Media Crumbs

The world is experiencing advocacy instead of analysis, distortion instead of reportage, a whitewash of the Islamist forces lined up against the West, the demonization of Israel in what is termed cutting edge media but what is actually a dinosaur being supplanted with readership on the web and more people in America tuning into conservative talk radio every day. Last night, I watched a Pierre Thomas report on ABC evening news. Thomas was interviewing the nation's first black Attorney General, ardent gun banner and recovering Clinton pardon broker, Eric Holder, when he asked about the black Harvard professor's case which has garnered so much recent notoriety. Thomas introduced that portion of the piece by subtly asking if Holder had been "racially profiled too", implying that it was a fait accompli that Harvard professor Gates had indeed been racially profiled and that the incident stemmed from the race prejudice of the white police. Thomas' use of the simple three letter word "too" damned Cambridge police officer Crowley. It is hard to imagine that the slight, which flies in the face of the evidence known of what actually happened-no profiling transpired on behalf of the police-was not deliberate. Then, on the 10 pm central BBC broadcast airing on PBS in Nashville, the reporter on the ground in Nigeria conveyed elaborate details about the recent and ongoing violence there, stating that police stations and churches had been attacked by a "radical sect" which she named and described, right down to two hundred men armed with AK-47s, but she assiduously managed to avoid mentioning that the culprits in the murder spree were Muslim, were Islamic extremists, were engaged in Jihad, or were in any other way associated with the faith of Mohammad. She intentionally left out the most glaring aspect of what the story should have been-namely that the attacks were prompted by the belief of the perpetrators in Islam-the motivation for the savagery had been to wage Jihad as an exercise of faith (or generously, the radicals perversion of what is religiously commanded). Later on the same BBC newscast, a correspondent reported from Kew Gardens in the UK on the world's oldest potted plant. She was reverently speaking in low tones as nine workers replanted the behemoth specimen-either because she is one of the worshippers in the new "green" religion, or more likely, that she was of the belief that the plant would be disturbed by anything louder than a whisper, as if she were dealing with babies in incubators or super sensitive zoo animals. In any event, to strain to hear a reporter only slightly more intelligent than the subject she was covering describing a plant in a rapturous hush, strained credulity and showed how far journalism is falling. Finally, America's dinosaur media is breathlessly helping the administration for which they work, no matter who actually signs their checks, to introduce the so-called "Cash for Clunkers" program, but I have heard from acquaintances who have been replacing vehicles that they were better served by a simpler old style trade or could receive a higher amount selling their used cars themselves rather than going through the rigmarole of paperwork and bureaucracy engendered by the new program. Though you will not hear it in the old line media dedicating itself to promoting Obama, the benefit to consumers of the CARS scheme, are anecdotally at least, negligible, if there is any advantage at all to participating. So like so much of what Obama and his minions have done so far, you are paying for it but will never derive any good from it. The networks do not invest any time investigating any of Obama's failures, but voters are figuring out for themselves, that what is being done for us by Obama, is actually being done to us.