If Obama Wins, the Left-Dominated Media Will be the Real Victors

Not in living memory has the mainstream media so openly and actively supported one candidate in a Presidential election. This is so evident that even liberal pundits such as former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers have written about the obvious pro-Obama media bias. Back in July, Ms. Myers observed in an article for Vanity Fair:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which evaluates more than 300 newspaper, magazine, and television stories each week, found that from June 9 (after Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination) until July 13, Obama was more prominently covered every single week. During one particular week, July 7–13, McCain was a significant presence in 48 percent of the stories—but Obama met that mark in 77 percent of the pieces. Similarly, the Tyndall Report, a media monitoring group, found that Obama received substantially more media attention.
I can only imagine what the gap must be like this week, as Obama continues to meet with world leaders and adoring crowds, while the mere presence of media’s biggest and brightest stars stamps each and every event as important!

Of course, the disparity only increased as the campaign wore on. However, while the strategic objective of electing Barack Obama President remained unaltered, the tactics changed. Now the media, who had once idealized John McCain as the anti-Bush Republican, turned on him like a jilted lover, alleging that the consistent conservative had somehow changed his philosophy and character. Here is an excerpt from the report of The Project for Excellence in Journalism about news media coverage in the six weeks between the conventions and the final Presidential debate:

Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates—according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.

Yet the campaign to elect Barack Obama was not restricted to the news media. Continuing and even amplifying a trend that has been evident throughout the George W. Bush Administration, the entertainment media joined the anti-Republican frenzy. Readers of the Los Angeles Times comic page are treated to a daily dose of anti-GOP propaganda courtesy of Doonesbury. Usually one or two other comic strips either promote Barack Obama, or criticize John McCain, George W. Bush or the Republican Party as well. Saturday Night Live was unable to constrain its Obama worship to Saturday night only, and instituted a Thursday night special for the closing weeks of the election campaign. Hollywood then joined in, with the first movie ever ridiculing a sitting President of the United States. Courtesy of Oliver Stone, "W" is suppposedly an understanding and sympathetic psychological study of how George W. Bush became a failed President, as if a meaningful evaluation of a Presidency can be made even before the President leaves office.

Nonetheless, one may have to award the Pulitzer Prize for unabashed advocacy journalism to the Los Angeles Times, after all. Back in April, Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Wallsten wrote an article about Senator Obama's close relationship with Rashid Khalidi, a history professor, sometime advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and full-time apologist for Palestinian terrorism. Wallesten highlighted the fact that Senator Obama delivered a toast in honor of his friend Khalidi at a going-away dinner sponsored by the Arab-American Action Network (AAAN) (which was founded by Khalidi), on the occasion of Khalidi's departure from Chicago in order to assume his prosent post as the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. (This endowed chair functions as Columbia's official contribution to anti-Zionism.) As one would expect, the gala evening, with Senator Obama in attendance, quickly became, in the words of Gateway Pundit, a "classic Jew bash." In Wallsten's words, as the story appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 10, 2008:

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

This story has returned to prominence, but only on conservative blogs, in recent days because Gateway Pundit learned in an interview with Peter Wallsten that the Los Angeles Times has a video of the Khalidi farewell party, but has refused to release it! It is not hard to understand why. A column about Khalidi by Fred Siegel and Sol Stern, which ran in the New York Sun, discloses that the commemorative book at the AAAN farewell dinner was filled with testimonials not only from Senator Obama, but the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Truly, the AAAN dinner for Rashid Khalidi was a left-wing gathering for the ages. The video may well show Obama, Khalidi, Ayers and Dohrn all celebrating together in enraptured comradeship.

As Gateway pundit concludes, "It's hard to imagine that the LA Times would hold onto a video of Sarah Palin praising an anti-Semitic radical and former PLO operative...
But, that is today's mainstream media." Indeed.

Yet the real danger from the present Presidential election is not just that the press was in the tank for Obama. We have lived with unrelenting anti-conservative media bias for at least 8 years. The real danger is that the media will finally realize their power, that they can deliver the White House, or a veto-proof majority in Congress, or in short order the U.S. Supreme Court, to the Democratic Party Left.

They will not be content with that triumph. They will want to repeat it again and again, and make sure it is enduring. Very quickly the Left will act to regulate and muzzle the one media sector that it has consistently failed to dominate, talk radio. Recently, Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman declared his support for reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. Once the Fairness Doctrine is back in place, with its practical effect confined to talk radio, left-wing domination of the mass media will be complete. Conservatives will still have a refuge on the web, but content regulation of blogs may follow.

The same pattern has held sway in Israel for decades. In ownership and editorial policy, the major daily newspapers (Ha'Aretz, Maariv, Yediot Acharonot) are either far left or at best center left. The sole exception is the English-language Jerusalem Post, which has little impact within Israel. Radio and television broadcasting stations are operated by a government agency, and the agency's bureaucratic ranks of on-air personalities, journalists and writers are a bastion of left-wing political opinion, even when a Likud nationalist government is in power. Benjamin Netanyahu was practically treated as a public enemy by the government broadcasters throughout his premiership. Religious settlers are nearly always portrayed as evil personified, while Israel cannot be too generous in territorial concessions to the Palestinians. The Israeli press and broadcast media would have one believe that the only obstacle to peace and brotherly love between Jews and Arabs is Israel's refusal to roll its borders back to the 1949 ceasefire lines.

The most outrageous example of law has been used to maintain media bias in Israel is the fate of Arutz Sheva (Channel 7)--Israel National Radio. For two decades, beginning in 1973, Israeli left-wing peace activist Abie Nathan operated a pirate radio station, the Voice of Peace, which broadcast from a ship in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. He was fawned over by the Israeli media, which treated him as a folk hero. However, when Arutz Sheva adopted the same ship-borne pirate radio strategy to promote its right-wing nationalist perspective, successive Israeli Labor Party governments did everything in their power to shut down the station, including criminal prosecution. In February 1999, the Knesset (which then had a rightist coalition majority) passed a law legalizing the operation of Arutz Sheva and absolving it of any criminal liability for earlier illegal broadcasting. Incredibly, left-wing litigants challenged the law before the leftist-dominated Israeli Supreme Court, which struck the law down! Today, one may listen to Arutz Sheva only over the internet, which is the only outlet that the Israeli Left has not found a means to control or legally suppress.

And that, my friends, is what I fear we have to look forward to, when the American liberal media fully realizes its power to control U.S. elections and policy.