A Spectator At The Orgy

'After The Orgy' -Reginald Marsh,1898-1954


Observing the way the vast majority of the dinosaur media has been behaving in the closing closing days of campaign `08, it's impossible for me not to feel a sense of foreboding, just from the look and tone of the party.

They have no clue how dangerous a game they're playing or the ultimate consequences, and I don't think they're going to fully appreciate the effects even on the morning after until it's too late

James Madison, the father of our Constitution - you know, the one Barack Obama thinks was a nifty political document for it's time but so-oo outdated nowadays- made rather a large deal of saying that "without an educated citizenry, popular government is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."

Part of the education of that citizenry has always been an objective, free and skeptical press, which is why the Founders made freedom of the press a cornerstone of the Bill Of Rights...even though most of them had any number of complaints about the scurrilous nature of some of it.

That safeguard seems to have fallen apart this election cycle, at least where most of the dinosaur media is concerned.I've never seen anything quite like it.

What we've been witnessing is the proposed elevation to the presidency of a candidate who's escaped even a cursory vetting by the supposedly objective journalists, whose function in a free society is to do exactly that. An dnot only are they not vetting him, they're actively pushing him. It's an astonishing lowering of journalistic standards and even a dereliction of the primary duty of a free press...to educate the citizenry.

A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”

McCain's positive coverage? A whopping fourteen per cent.

Another Pew study showed that almost 85% of the respondents not only agreed that most journalists were biased towards Obama, but were actually slanting coverage to help him get elected.

No kidding.

The little man behind the screen is not even bothering to draw the curtain anymore, even when he's caught in the middle of the act. They simply don't care anymore.

Here's just a few examples..and I won't even mention the simpering, softball interviews:

* The Los Angeles Times briefly mentioned that it has a video of the Obamas toasting prominent former PLO spokesmouth Rashid Khalidi at a meeting of an anti-Israeli group called the Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003, where the Chosen One praises a man who called homicide bombers 'legitimate resistance' while Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn look on. Obviously this is of interest, considering that Obama has made courting the Jewish vote a big part of his campaign while routinely surrounded himself with Islamists and anti-Semitic political allies like Jeremiah Wright and Khalid al-Mansour. But The Times, in response to numerous requests to make this video public so the electorate can see this for themselves decided that a brief mention in print was all the peons were entitled to.At a time when t the Times is hemorrhaging readers and ad revenues and laying off staff, one would think that a newsworthy item like this would be a priority. Unless the Time's political agenda is taking precedence.

* Speaking of questionable associations, there's been no coverage in the dinosaur media of Obama's connections to the Nation Of Islam and the Saudis. Nor,outside of Stanley Kurz in the NRO, has anyone delved into Obama's connection with Bill Ayers and the Woods Foundation, and more importantly the radical groups that Foundation gave substantial amounts of money to.Nor has anyone explored the relationship between Obama, Tony Rezco and Saddam Hussein's bagman Nadhmi Auchi .

* Aside from a few cursory mentions, there's been virtual silence by the media on the Obama Campaign's willful circumventing of campaign finance laws.And silence on Obama's blatant mistatements regarding his radical positions on what amounts to infanticide.

* Aside from his relationships with Ayers, whole areas of Barack Obama's past records remain hidden and off the record - his doctoral thesis, his college transcripts, his health records, his list of law clients, whether he ever renounced his Indonesian citizenship..the list is simply astounding, especially when you consider the microscopic attention applied to every detail of the life of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

And those are just a few of the many items I could cite.

So, why exactly has the dinosaur media become so obsessively slanted and one-sided - even to the point of becoming advocates?

Forget about journalistic ethics for a moment, but simply consider the profit motive. Wouldn't the coffers of the dinosaur media be served by running stories about the above items in an election year when there's obvious interests?

Instead, what it really comes down to, at least for a lot of the denizens of the newsroom is sheer survival.

Bias in media towards the Left and the Democrat Party has been going on for quite some time, but the major difference now is the emergence of New Media -talk radio, the blogosphere, FOX and other outlets - that has disrupted what amounted to a monopoly on news and commentary. People no longer have to put up with the likes of Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather. They can go elsewhere.

And it shows. Viewership for the Big Three networks is plummeting, as is the circulation for most major newspapers. Part of it is simply the constant presence of the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle that can no longer be fed by the morning paper and the evening news, but the biggest single reason is that there are other channels of information and that bias is perceptible now. At least with enough of the audience that it's affecting the bottom line.

Could a number of the editors who decide what gets on the news be making a last ditch effort to try and put in a candidate who, with the aid of one party rule in Washington will re-enact the Fairness Doctrine and give them back the lion's share of the action?

At least one news professional thinks so:

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power … only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

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.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country …

What I'm more concerned with is the morning after of this particular orgy. The party is so loud and out of control that the revelers are clueless about the danger they're courting, even if they pull this off.

One obvious symptom of how bad it is , as I see one press acolyte after another diving in to uncritically praise the Chosen One is how eager they've been to suppress their normal skepticism and indulge in the audacity of hoping. They hope Obama's radical associates and past positions are going to have little or no influence on him now. They hope that the far Left views he's espoused during the campaign are just rhetoric, and he's going to govern more towards the center. They hope that his near total inexperience with foreign affairs can be offset the likes of Joe Biden, a senator who's been proven wrong on nearly every national security position he's ever taken - and that nothing really bad happens anyway. They hope they're going to continue to be welcome at the party, no matter what. And they hope that the thuggish bent Obama and his political advisers have shown in suppressing dissent, punishing 'enemies', and circumventing the law for the Greater Good is just politics, to be abandoned once the One is inside the White House. And they hope that it will never be turned on them

Of course, the biggest hope they have is that if Obama gets in with a complaisant Democrat Congress and the Fairness Doctrine gets re-enacted, their fellow Americans are going to forget all about the way most of the dinosaur media behaved at the orgy and go back to trusting them again, just like old times.

Unfortunately, that genie's already out of the bottle.

And once a major institution in a free society loses credibility the way much of the dinosaur media have in this election cycle, once people no longer believe in it, there's no going back. And as Madison observed, that's a dangerous place for a democracy to be.