Media Puts Blind Trust In John Kerry's Claim of Blind Trusts

Kerry says that the various accounts in which he mad lots of trades armed with nonpublic information could not possibly be a cause for scandal, as these accounts were in blind trust.

The media reliably parrots this.

One problem.

[Quoting an old, pre-2004 election article in the LAT:] Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton, agreed that although the amount of Heinz Kerry’s wealth was not a campaign issue, it could cause problems if Kerry were elected.

“They will have to seriously consider putting it in a blind trust,” Panetta said. “All of us who have served in government have had to do that. In the end, it is the better way to go, because it removes any suspicion that a decision is self-serving. You have enough problems just making a decision, without dealing with the concern you may be putting money in your pocket.”

Yet Mr. Panetta’s quote should have made it clear to anyone reading—and especially to journalists at the Los Angeles Times—that Mr. Kerry did not, in fact, have a blind trust. So why did the media fail to properly vet a presidential candidate’s investments?

For conservatives, the answer is simple: liberal media bias. But Schweizer says he finds the media’s glaring oversight disheartening.

“The fact that it took a Tallahassee-based policy wonk working with a team of college student researchers to uncover the ‘honest graft’ by Democrats and Republicans and publish it all in a book like Throw Them All Out is, I think, a little depressing,” he says. “The media play an important role in vetting our leaders. When they fail to do so, it hurts us all, regardless of our political views.”

I mentioned earlier: there are two aspects of media bias to the media's determination to tank this story.

The first is simple political bias. Democrats have been robbing us stupid for decades, and they want to protect their beloved socialist thieves.

The other bias is due to institutional turf-protection and defensiveness over incompetency.

The media could have had this story. But they were too lazy and/or too biased to report on it. It wasn't fed directly to them by a prosecutor making a case, so why bother doing any digging?

Laziness and incompetence.

Because they missed a big story, and yet they are supposedly in charge of Discovering Big Stories, it must be the case then that this is not a big story at all. It must be a tiny little story, easily poo-pooed.

Because if it's big, and the media missed it... what purpose do they serve, then? What justification is there for their social status?

And 1%-level salaries? (Well, the top ones are 1-percenters, anyway.)

The One Percent Media

Protecting our Socialist Overlords through our profound political bias and simple inability to serve as anything other than palace stenographers.

More: On John Kerry's aristocratically-pointy nose for hot medical stocks.

posted by Ace at 05:00 PM

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