How Journalists Who Accept the Confiscationist Belief System Write About Obama

  

Obviously, the overwhelming majority of journalists in the United States are essentially Democrat Party campaign operatives; their efforts at objective reporting are quite amusing.  Their utter submersion in the Manhattan-Malibu axis is, in a way, a good thing, because it ensures that their writing, TV, and web reporting is restricted to an audience of people who already accept Confiscationism as a political philosophy.  In other words, they’re preaching to the choir.  They’re harmless inside their bubble.

It’s only during election season that this particular brand of intellectual dishonesty becomes a powerful weapon, as both McCain and Romney could tell you.

Here I want to briefly look at passages from two recent articles about President Obama that will illustrate this point in a crystal clear manner.  The first short passage is from an article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine in April, 2014.  The second is from one by Elizabeth Drew in the most recent edition of The New York Review of Books.  First the Chait article – here’s the passage:

          “He’s had to deal with race explicitly in a few excruciating circumstances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s arrest.  (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.)”

The distortion of the truth here is absolutely stupefying.  Even leaving aside the question of the appropriateness of the President of the United States weighing in on a local law enforcement matter (how many thousands of incidents like this must take place in the country every single day, and what is the criteria he uses to pick any particular one to insert himself into?), this video is more or less straightforward as to what Obama’s initial response was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYsW_PxWAM

“The police acted stupidly” is clearly not positioning oneself as a mediator.  The fact is that Obama only positioned himself as a mediator after it became clear that both he and Gates had picked the wrong cop to try and bulldoze with Sharptonesque knee jerkism:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/28/sgt_crowley_a_cop_in_full_97643.html

Turning to the article by Elizabeth Drew, this piece is a kind of standard Washington insider look at the upcoming midterm elections but, whereas Chait at least attempts to dress up his bias in a suit of quasi objectivity, Drew makes no attempt to conceal her status as a Democrat Party enabler.  After a few paragraphs of snoozeville boilerplate she drops in the sentence “It’s undeniable that the president’s race has a significant part in the destructive ways in which he is talked about and opposed.” 

This statement is just casually dropped in as corroborated fact, like the day’s weather or telling someone what your height and weight is.  The author apparently feels no need to give any kind of supporting documentation whatsoever.  Might it be helpful to name a name, or give a concrete example, of such an assertion?  Of course, I understand the deal – the publication’s readership is such that there isn’t any need to do so.  The contention is accepted a priori. The President by any objective measure is not doing a very good job, and the media is heavily invested in him, so if he looks bad then they look bad as well.  This is simple human nature.  Unfortunately it’s preposterously slanted journalism. 

This kind of Libscreech, when it exists inside the cocoon – as New York and The New York Review of Books obviously do – is totally harmless.  It is only when it starts to be multiplied in every kind of media, both new and old, that it begins to hurt Republicans.  As I said, ask McCain or Romney.