Redflagnews: Why the Mainstream Media Failed to Break Obama Scandals..
BY: Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon
Last week John Nolte of Breitbart observed that the mainstream media
had failed to break any of the controversial news occupying Washington.
This week Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, without intending to,
explained why.
There are four stories harming President Obama’s approval rating, and
the heirs of Tarbell and Woodward and Novak uncovered none of them. The
long-simmering tale of what happened before, during, and after the
attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012,
was all but ignored by media other than Fox until Gregory Hicks’
blockbuster testimony before the House Oversight Committee last month.
It was the IRS, in a carefully planned “apology,” that revealed to the
world it had targeted the applications of conservative and Tea Party
groups for special scrutiny. The Justice Department, not the press,
announced it had been scouring AP phone records to plug national
security leaks. And Edward Snowden, the contractor who exposed secret
intelligence, went to the Guardian, a left-wing British rag, with his
scoop. (Only when Snowden’s anti-anti-terror accomplice Laura Poitras
suggested, in the words of Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald, “It would be
good to have the Washington Post invested in the leak, so it wasn’t
just us—to tie in official Washington in the leak” did the three
filtradors approach former Post reporter Barton Gellman.)
Four stories, four separate races in which the establishment press,
the major print dailies and the heavily watched network broadcasts, are
sweating to catch up. “We are getting big stories wrong, over and over
again,” said Scott Pelley, the anchor of the CBS evening news, in a
speech at Quinnipiac University in May. Did he, did anybody, read the
June 13 Washington Post, I wonder; did Pelley’s eye scan the innocuous
headline—“Media, administration deal with conflicts”—and the
well-kneaded copy below? If so he would have learned much about life in
the capital city.
“Conflicts” is not the best description of Farhi’s subject. His topic
is marriages, unions, and blood, legal and romantic and familial
connections between individuals where one party works in media and
another works in politics. The extent of such links is staggering. Farhi
has to interrupt his story to announce, in a parenthetical, that Post
reporter Sari Horwitz, who covers the Justice Department, is married to
William B. Schultz, who is Kathleen Sebelius’ top lawyer at the
Department of Health and Human Services. Ben Sherwood, the president of
ABC News, is brother to Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “a top national
security adviser to President Obama.” Another Obama national security
aide, Ben Rhodes, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS News. One
of CNN’s top D.C. hacks is married to Tom Nides, whose upward career
trajectory has taken him from the office of Democratic congressional
powerbroker Tony Coelho to, where else, Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse, and
Morgan Stanley, as well as a two-year stint as an undersecretary of
state for Hillary Clinton. Whose daughter is on contract with NBC.
White House spokesman Jay Carney, who worked for many years at Time
magazine, is married to Claire Shipman, a correspondent for ABC News.
The White House correspondent for NPR, Ari Shapiro, has been married to
former White House counsel Michael Gottlieb since 2004. Longtime NPR
personality Michele Norris went on leave in 2011, when her husband
Broderick Johnson, a corporate lawyer who served in the Clinton White
House, joined the Obama reelection campaign as a full-time adviser. Wall
Street Journal political reporter Neil King is married to Shailagh
Murray, who serves as communications director for Vice President Joe
Biden, and who used to report on Congress for the Post. Savannah Guthrie
of NBC recently became engaged to Mike Feldman, a former Gore aide who
is now part of the Democratic Glover Park Group consultancy. Syndicated
columnist Connie Schultz is married to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of
Ohio.
Read more at http://redflagnews.com/headlines/why-the-mainstream-media-failed-to-break-obama-scandals
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